People

I am an environmental social scientist and historian who incorporates interdisciplinary theories and methods from environmental history, political ecology and critical human geography. In addition to my history of applied and engaged activism within and outside of the academy, I have worked professionally as a journalist, documentary film-maker, campaign organizer, college instructor and organization leader.

At a broad scale, my research focuses on several topics: a critical history of national parks and wilderness, race and identity, nature-society interactions, local ecological knowledge, and human dimensions of climate change. During my time in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias Park over the past decade, I have incorporated a fine-grained ethnographic and participatory research approach, using a combination of structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation and extensive archival research.  Drawing on literature in political ecology, environmental history and human geography, my dissertation, “From Copper to Conservation: Mining for Narratives Within and Beyond Wrangell-St Elias National Park and Preserve,” examines how conflicting narratives at local and national scales influence and interfere with management strategies. I am particularly interested in how the benefits and burdens of the outcomes of these conflicts are spread across different sectors of people living within the 23-resident zone communities of the park in relation to race, gender and economic status and they ways in which people are resisting these outcomes.

Recent scholarship has cautioned about the need to be careful about using resilience models as a stand-alone model to understand the dynamic interaction between socio and ecological systems (SES). These models often under theorize political economic and historic factors in addressing vulnerability. In order to better engage with questions of social difference and inequality, I focus on the important role of the interaction of local and national narratives as one set of interrelated actors that have not been adequately addressed by economic and scientifically driven management models alone. I argue that these narratives have an influence on knowledge production that stands aside from traditional “variables” in management models. In particular, the way people make sense of the non-human world through narrative offers information researchers may not gather entirely through modeling, advanced technology or scientific analysis.