I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. I study the politics of environmental knowledge and the dynamics of environmental controversies.
In my research, I seek to understand the power relations under which environmental knowledge is produced, the political consequences of new interventions into the nonhuman environment, and how technical, scientific, legal and political conceptions of nature interact in the context of social conflict and environmental change. Right now, I am particularly focused on the historical dynamics of anti-environmentalism, and the relationship between what we know about nature and our instrumental uses of it. My published work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Science, and Theory and Society, among other venues.
My current book project, Stupid Little Fish: Extraction, Conservation, and the Politics of Environmental Decline (under advance contract with Columbia University Press) is a deep dive into the case of the Delta Smelt, a small endangered species of fish caught in the center of California’s so-called “water wars” that subsequently became enrolled in the USA’s partisan culture wars. Drawing on rich historical and ethnographic evidence, and systematically analyzed media data, the project “follows the fish” through the (often ironic) entanglements of extractive infrastructure, science, law, electoral politics, and the public sphere. It offers a new theoretical framework for analyzing conflicts over natural resources that centers on how attempts to control and define nature originating in one domain of social life overflow into others, triggering a chain of subsequent interventions that shape the terms of future environmental conflict. This work is supported by an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship and has received awards and honorable mentions from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Theory, Environmental Sociology, Science Knowledge and Technology, Sociology of Law, and Animals and Society, as well as the Pacific Sociological Association and the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, where I completed my doctorate in 2020.
At Tufts, my research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Faculty Research Awards Committee, the Climate, Renewable Energy, Agriculture, Technology, and Ecology (CREATE) Solutions initiative, and a Neubauer Faculty Fellowship. During my graduate studies at Berkeley, I held fellowships sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law & Society, the Institute of Governmental Studies, the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, and the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group.
I am currently engaged in several collaborative research projects including one on the environmental justice implications of the rise of data-driven and algorithmic approaches to natural resource conservation (with Carl Boettiger, Millie Chapman, Razvan Amironesei, Hilary Faxon, Samantha Jo Fried, Marcus Lapeyrolerie, Michael Reed, Amy Van Scoyoc, and Lily Xu), another on the moral regulation of states by financial markets (with Marion Fourcade and Irem Inal), a third on the politics of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic (with Andrew McCumber, Razvan Amironesei, and June Jeon), and a fourth untangling the different ways that unforeseen disruptions unsettle social experience (with Ioana Sendroiu). I am continuing my work on California water politics, most recently with a focus on the relationships among infrastructure failure, policy change, climate change, and land fallowing. I am also laying the groundwork for a second book-length project, tentatively titled, Divided by Nature. In it, I will analyze the socio-historical process through which environmental politics became partisan in the USA.
I teach Environmental Sociology and Social Theory at Tufts University. I am also a faculty affiliate with the Environmental Studies Program at Tufts, and an affiliated scholar with the Climate Social Science Network at the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society. From 2020 to 2022, I was an affiliate of the Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I am a member of the Bay-Delta Social Science Community of Practice Steering Committee, which is organized by the Delta Stewardship Council, a California state agency, and a member of the editorial board of the Law & Society Review.
View my CV here.