I earned my Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford and George Washington University. My research and teaching interests span environmental, political, economic, visual, public, and community-engaged anthropology; discard studies; the environmental humanities; critical theory; STS; and Chinese, Asian, and American studies. As a former junk artist, punk rock drummer, and science fair champion, I enjoy exploring creative, multimedia, and interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching.
My work is driven by two mutually reinforcing goals: (1) reexamining existing analytics for theorizing agency and human embeddedness in the more-than-human world; and (2) addressing environmental and social justice challenges through critical scholarship, innovative pedagogy, and praxis that extends beyond academia. These goals are at the heart of my current book project, Uncontained: Scrap Worlds in and Beyond China. The book offers a political anthropology of structurally aligned discards uncontained by the political borders of China, including objects, bodies, and places. It does so through an ethnographic account centering the lives of informal waste workers—a subset of the rural migrant population that faces political, economic, and cultural marginalization. Based on over two years of fieldwork in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, I trace disjunctions between scrap traders and state-backed projects that seek to bring western-style recycling systems, aesthetics, and ethics to China. A key argument of the book builds on this disjunction—that recycling "the right way" is an impossibility within late capitalism's regime of disposability, and that recycling as an imagined citizen-state partnership benefiting an abstract environment only appears to work in situations where the polluting and ineffecient industrial processing of recycling occurs elsewhere. In recent decades these "elsewheres" have largely been located in China and Asia more broadly, which has deeply shaped global imaginaries of urban environmental modernity. The book goes further to highlight how waste and the migrants who live off this waste in Kunming do much more than either protect or threaten environment. Together they are unruly collaborators that generate value, redirect flows of toxicity, and fuel new forms of sociality and collective politics that are largely illegible to the state.
Selected Writings:
"" (collaborative team effort, Win Cowger et al. 2024). Science Advances, 10, eadj8275
"" (2023). The China Quarterly, 255, 560-574. **recipient of the Gordon White prize for the most original article in CQ in 2023**
"" (2023). In Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats (edited by Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClellend), Penn State University Press, 194-213.
"" (2021). Education 69É«ÇéÊÓƵ Asia, 26(1), 35-40.
"" (2021). Contemporary China Centre Blog. Reprinted in Chapter 2 "Environment" in (2022), edited by Séagh Kehoe and Gerda Wielander, p.32-36.
"" (2019). Critical Asian Studies, 51(4), 537-557.
"" (with Goeun Lee, 2019). Made in China Journal.
"" (2018). The New Internationalist, Issue 516, Nov/Dec.
"" (2018). Toxic News, Nov 1.
"" (2017). Anthropology News 57(6), e108-e111.