Bio

Before beginning my PhD studies, I spent nearly a decade working in K-12 education with a focus on consulting/tutoring for special needs students and their families, people ranging from the ultra-wealthy to the undocumented, work which shapes my approach to both teaching and research. For the last two years of my doctoral program, I was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. I earned my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford in June 2022.

Academic Appointments

  • Lecturer, Stanford Introductory Studies - Civic, Liberal, and Global Education

Contact

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 3068

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

My research on the environmental politics of hydrocarbon extraction in Ecuador focused on the relationship between Indigenous people and leftist national government committed to environmental protection, multiculturalism, and hydrocarbon extraction. My research in the Colombian llanos addresses the environmental politics of people who identify as farmers and hydrocarbon industry employees in a region marked not only by civil conflict but also by colonial and developmental imaginaries of the state. My Latin American research was foundational my dissertation fieldwork based in the small town of Tioga in northwestern North Dakota’s Bakken region, characterized by farmland fracking.

Social and ecological uncertainties are inherent to this juxtaposition of extraction and agriculture. Those uncertainties are managed by landowners, officials, scientists, and industry personnel. My book project analyzes how managing social/ecological uncertainty was integral to colonizing the Northern Plains, arguing that the managerial ideals of settler colonialism persist not only in the environmental politics of fracking but in a number of socioecological issues far beyond rural, conservative, and pro-oil North Dakota.

2021-22 Courses

All Publications