About
A white person with short dark curly hair, nose and ear piercings, and orange tortoise shell glasses in a black sweater and blue collared shirt stands with hands in pockets, looking away from the camera and smiling while talking. In the background is a wooden fence strung with lights, the wispy branches of a bare maple tree obscuring rooftops and a cloudless blue sky. Red and yellow distortions streak across the left side of the photo, slightly obscuring the image.
Hi. Welcome to my website.
I am associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where I teach courses ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. At UofT, I am also affiliated with the Center for Global Disability Studies, the Center for the Study of the United States, and the Women and Gender Studies Institute. My work spans sociocultural and medical anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies (STS). Much of what I do is about how the harms of post-9/11 warmaking manifest in the contemporary US--from the collateral effects of military medicine's salvific promise to the routine production of environmental illness. I also explore how the overt violence of war making is tangled up with other structures of harm, particularly ableism, heteropatriarchy, and environmental racism. My first book, After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015), is an ethnography of grievously injured US soldiers and their family members at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It has been widely reviewed and taught and received honorable mention for the 2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.
I’m currently working on three new book projects. The first, The Significance of Others, is a collection of ethnographic essays about how the US over-investment one form of ‘significant otherness’—the relations of the nuclear family—shows up as a military investment in spouses as the solution to the problem of military violence that marks war veterans, an investment that renders other relations ‘insignificant’. The essays focus specifically on the way this particular “regime of significant otherness” obscures imminent relations between disabled US veterans and disability justice activists in the US, and also relations between disabled US veterans and civilians debilitated by US war violence. This project was supported by at 2018 NSF CAREER Award. The second, whose working title is War and the Logics of Combustion, is a collaboration with Kenneth MacLeish (Vanderbilt University) and focuses on the US military's use of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third, Homunculus Revolts, is a biography of the cortical homunculus that speaks to the entanglement of race and disability in neurological instantiations of the brain/body dualism.
In addition to these book projects, I also have two related streams of work, one at the interface of STS and Disability Studies and the other focused on toxicity. The former has included a collaborative research project with wearable robotics engineers, and efforts to support the growing field of Crip Technoscience, including the 2023 launch of the Crip Technoscience Network with colleagues Aimie Hamraie and Raquel Vehlo.
My work on toxicity includes Project Pleasantville, a community engaged team project documenting the history and present life of Black civic engagement and toxic exposure in Houston's historic Pleasantville neighbourhood, which I co-founded with together with Lacy Johnson, Bridgette Murray, and Cleophus Sharp, as well as a project about the 1979 chemical train derailment and fire in Mississauga (with invaluable help from Sophia Jaworski). In 2021, I launched a new initiative at UTM called the Toxicity, Waste, and Infrastructure Group (TWIG) Research Kitchen. The TWIG Research Kitchen offers a convivial feminist space for work and play across the environmental humanities and social sciences.
Before coming to the University of Toronto, I spent five years as assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice University, where I was also core faculty member at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Program in Medical Humanities. Prior to that, I was a postdoc in the department of anthropology at Columbia University and at Rutgers University's Center for Research on Health, Health Care and Ageing Policy. In addition to academic journals, l also write in a variety of spaces of online scholarship, including anthro{dendum}.org (nee SavageMinds.org), Somatosphere.net, Public Books, and Twitter (yes, Twitter).
You can read more about each of my ongoing projects below.
(If you need a short research bio, click here)
Socialities of Care + The Significance of Others
This project exploring questions of “care” in the worlds of post-9/11 U.S. veterans and caregivers (broadly defined) and aims to put these worlds into relation with the worlds of disability community, culture, and practice. I am interested in the collateral effects of capacitating certain (in this case, heteronormative) arrangements and forms of life and care, rather than others. This involves thinking about modes of intimacy and sociality that are supported, and those that are disregarded, in the name of care for and support of veteran’s lives, and the apparent divergence between disability worlds and activism, on the one hand, and the intimate and political lives of injured veterans, on the other. This project brings together the anthropology of care, critical disability studies and crip theory, queer theory, and, increasingly, Black feminist analytics. Socialities of Care is supported by an NSF CAREER award. To stay up to date about this project, check out the Socialities of Care Newsletter, or contact me to subscribe.
The Politics of Toxicity
This project grows out of my work on the textures of military harm. Originally funded by the VA's War Related Illness and Injury Study Center (WRIISC), my co-PI [Kenneth MacLeish, Vanderbilt University) and began exploring the experiences of exposure to massive toxic open-air waste burning pits widely used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. This part of my toxicity work focuses on the experiences of exposed veterans and their caregivers and their efforts to seek both recognition and care. It also expands out to questions of military toxicity more broadly, including the toxic legacies of these pits in the Middle East, and the way that thinking about the material specificities of combustion can help us develop new analytics for thinking about war.
This project has extended to community based work and partnerships exploring the legacies of environmental racism, extractive capitalism, and the materialities of the military industrical complex in Houston and the broader Gulf of Mexico. This includes Project Pleasantville, a multimedia team project about the Pleasantville neighborhood of Houston and its twinned legacies of Black civic engagement and industrial harm. Together with Bridgette Murray, founder of Pleasantville’s grass roots environmental justice organization ACTS, we are currently working on a digital exhibit for the Houston Flood Museum, an oral history drive, and an overhaul of the neighborhood’s wikipedia page.
Disability and Technology
This project involves creating new and more convivial intersections between Disability Studies and STS. Though interested in many of the same topics and practices, these two fields have remained not only separate, but often hostile to each other. Through research projects, as well as network building and new collaborations, this project is part of a growing effort to speak across this divide and foster what others have recently dubbed Crip Technoscience. As part of this project, I have done collaborative writing with the late Nick Dupree about the embodied experience of ventilators, collaborative research on the designing of wearable robotics, with co-PIs Marcia O'Malley (Rice University, Mechanical Engineering), Chad Rose (Auburn University, Engineering) Phillip Kortum (Rice University, Psychological Sciences), funded by a Rice University Interdisciplinary Excellence Award. With my colleague Stephany Lloyd (Université Laval) I co-organized a set of panels for the 2019 meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science called Beyond the Prosthetic Imaginary: New Intersections between STS and Disability Studies. Aimi Hamraie (Vanderbilt), Raquel Vhelo (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and I are also currently launching the Crip Technoscience Research Network to connect folks invested in this critical project.
Homunculus Revolts
A kind of biography of the cortical homunculus (the neurological map of the body in the brain), this project combines my interest in the history of neurology with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and crip theory. Part of a growing field of feminist and disability interventions into STS and neuroscience, Homunculus Revolts traces the place of femme, disabled, and racialized figures at the center of early 20th century knowledge making about the brain. Through archival work, speculative biography, and cultural critique, it also seeks to offer new critiques of the mind-body split embedded in normative models of the person, a split that is central to so the entangled reproduction of so many medicalized and biologized categories of social difference. For more, check out this (poorly captioned) talk I gave at Columbia’s Hayman Center for the Humanities here, or the related paper published at Somatosphere.org.