Geographer | Political Ecologist | Community Organizer

I am a geographer and political ecologist interested in environmental justice, sustainability, social movements, and Southeast Asia. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. I am a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) recipient. My research centers on power and political discourses that operate in Thailand’s plastic pileup. I am particularly interested in political ecologies of financialization, political geographies of volume, feminist and Marxist critiques of ‘expertise,’ environmental subjectivity, and critical Thai studies as they relate to plastic waste in Thailand. I have experience working at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand, and conducted my master’s ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok. I also served as Conference Chair of the 10th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference. I’m a community organizer and have worked on issues from restoring voting rights to Kentuckians with felonies in their past to fighting for collective bargaining rights in higher education as a union organizer in Kentucky and Hawaiʻi. I majored in Geography at James Madison University and co-founded a fossil fuel divestment campaign as an undergraduate.