About

Across North America, communities find themselves caught in an impossible bind: the industries that provided their livelihoods for generations are the same ones destroying the environments they depend on. When these industries abandon ship, communities are left managing both economic devastation and environmental damage, often blamed for problems they didn’t create while being asked to solve crises beyond their control.

This dilemma reveals fundamental tensions in current approaches to addressing environmental crises in an era of mobile capital and abandoned places. How might environmental justice be enacted when some of the communities most harmed by environmental damage are also economically dependent on harmful industries? What happens when communities inherit both the environmental costs and the responsibility to identify solutions long after the profits have moved elsewhere?

My dissertation, “Newfoundland Ghost Nets: Fathoming the Debris of Empire,” argues that ghost nets—lost and abandoned fishing nets—are material traces of how colonial capitalism’s extractive logics continue to shape the contemporary crises of late liberalism. Through ethnographic work with fishing communities, scientists, and environmentalists on the island of Newfoundland, I examine how people address issues of cultural and economic survival and environmental protection in the wake of abandonment by extractive industries.

This work grows from my broader interest in the relationship between social inequality and environmental change, which I examine both through research and teaching. As an educator, I co-designed and taught Yale’s “Inequality and the Anthropocene: Thinking the Unthinkable” seminar and served as a Teaching Fellow for “Inequality in America,” “Multispecies Worlds,” and “The Anthropology of Outer Space.” I am a Pedagogy Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

With support from the Fulbright Foundation and National Geographic Society, I have conducted fieldwork in fishing communities across the North Atlantic, from Maine and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, to Scotland’s Shetland Islands. I strive to communicate research both within and beyond academia through art, non-fiction writing, and as a National Geographic community hub coordinator for women and non-binary people working in anthropology, archaeology, and related fields.

I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University and a visiting graduate student in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.