I conduct innovative qualitative and community-engaged research that builds on critical ecological, feminist, race, and Indigenous theory to address the co-development of social and environmental change, with a particular focus on the political conditions that foster inequitable, intersecting crises worldwide and the ways communities achieve greater justice.
My current research investigates environmental justice in the first two years of life, with a dynamic focus on food, water, housing, and climate particularly across the United States and sovereign Indigenous nations within. From this project, I have published about the relationship between food equity and structural environments in Environmental Justice (lead article, 2018) and in Breastfeeding Medicine (2017). Also, as part of this work, the African American Breastfeeding Network and I co-launched WE-RISE (Water and Environmental Research for Infants' Safe Eating), to connect and amplify community health workers, activists, students, and professional researchers in centering urban families' experiences during lead contaminated drinking water crises. We conducted collaborative research including surveys, community conversations, legislative tracking, GIS, and content analysis, and we directed over 80% of the funding we received to impacted groups. Together, we also published on the lived experiences of families navigating contaminated water in their environment in the Journal of Human Lactation (2021) and on the histories of racialized, classed, and gendered residential segregation informing this in a special issue on Black Lives Matter in the journal Environmental Justice (2022). I also speak widely to scholars and practitioners on these topics, such as in invited presentations in 2022 at the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Population Health Institute.
Additionally, I analyze climate activism, including its history, politics, and impacts. I published on this topic with Summer Gray, Corrie Grosse, and Brigid Mark in the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2021) and on educators' role within this with Corrie Grosse in the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (2020), featured in the Climate Strike Educator Resource Guide (2019) and Global Campaign for PEACEducation (2019), among other outlets.
Previously, I completed my dissertation, Cultivating Local Food: Knowledge, Power, and (Trans)Formations in American Policy and Society, which investigates the way distinct racialized and place-based communities mobilize knowledge in food systems policy, and to what effect, with a comparative focus on Detroit and Cleveland with the U.S. context. I published from this in Science as Culture (special issue on justice and counter expertise, 2019), Urban Farm Magazine (2015), and with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) for their What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen? report (2017).
I have also advanced shorter qualitative research projects concerning the global epistemic dimensions of intellectual property rights debates in food and agriculture (published in Mobilization: An International Journal, 2015), disparities in inclusion in environmental impact statements (published in the Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 2013), and the ethical treatment of human subjects of research (with Raymond De Vries, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2011).
Funding sources for my research include, the National Institutes of Health, Government of Canada, Center for Ethics in Public Life, Graham Sustainability Institute, American Sociological Association, and Mellon Foundation, among others.
My current research investigates environmental justice in the first two years of life, with a dynamic focus on food, water, housing, and climate particularly across the United States and sovereign Indigenous nations within. From this project, I have published about the relationship between food equity and structural environments in Environmental Justice (lead article, 2018) and in Breastfeeding Medicine (2017). Also, as part of this work, the African American Breastfeeding Network and I co-launched WE-RISE (Water and Environmental Research for Infants' Safe Eating), to connect and amplify community health workers, activists, students, and professional researchers in centering urban families' experiences during lead contaminated drinking water crises. We conducted collaborative research including surveys, community conversations, legislative tracking, GIS, and content analysis, and we directed over 80% of the funding we received to impacted groups. Together, we also published on the lived experiences of families navigating contaminated water in their environment in the Journal of Human Lactation (2021) and on the histories of racialized, classed, and gendered residential segregation informing this in a special issue on Black Lives Matter in the journal Environmental Justice (2022). I also speak widely to scholars and practitioners on these topics, such as in invited presentations in 2022 at the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Population Health Institute.
Additionally, I analyze climate activism, including its history, politics, and impacts. I published on this topic with Summer Gray, Corrie Grosse, and Brigid Mark in the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2021) and on educators' role within this with Corrie Grosse in the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (2020), featured in the Climate Strike Educator Resource Guide (2019) and Global Campaign for PEACEducation (2019), among other outlets.
Previously, I completed my dissertation, Cultivating Local Food: Knowledge, Power, and (Trans)Formations in American Policy and Society, which investigates the way distinct racialized and place-based communities mobilize knowledge in food systems policy, and to what effect, with a comparative focus on Detroit and Cleveland with the U.S. context. I published from this in Science as Culture (special issue on justice and counter expertise, 2019), Urban Farm Magazine (2015), and with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) for their What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen? report (2017).
I have also advanced shorter qualitative research projects concerning the global epistemic dimensions of intellectual property rights debates in food and agriculture (published in Mobilization: An International Journal, 2015), disparities in inclusion in environmental impact statements (published in the Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 2013), and the ethical treatment of human subjects of research (with Raymond De Vries, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2011).
Funding sources for my research include, the National Institutes of Health, Government of Canada, Center for Ethics in Public Life, Graham Sustainability Institute, American Sociological Association, and Mellon Foundation, among others.
