Welcome!
I am a feminist political ecologist and interdisciplinary social scientist who partners with communities to support how Indigenous Peoples, Traditional Peoples, and Local Communities’ livelihoods and well-being can be sustained and to identify the pathways that shape just futures. I specialize in collaborative, transdisciplinary projects and creating mixed methods ethnographic teams. I work in multiple modalities and mediums, and value digital humanities labs and critical digital and design spaces for engagement.
I joined the Purdue Faculty in 2009 and am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. I am thrilled to be affiliate faculty in the Institute for a Sustainable Future (ISF), Ecological and Environmental Engineering Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Digital Humanities, and Latin American and Latino Studies programs and certificates on campus. I also am affiliated with the Native American Educational and Cultural Center and the Critical Data Studies Collective, and one of the several founding members of the Building Sustainable Communities Signature Area at the ISF.
Using a feminist political ecology framework, I map out historical and spatial inequalities and injustices and highlight pathways for self-determination and sovereignty in the context of acute change. My work focuses on the intersections of the environment, media, and power.
In all of my work I stitch together insights from engaged anthropology and visual anthropology to create collaborative projects. In addition to environmental anthropology, I find kinship with decolonizing approaches to research inquiry alongside insights from discard studies, anthropological of climate change, cultural geography, Indigenous studies, and Latin American studies.
I have partnered with the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó Peoples, an Indigenous community in Brazil, and am currently working on team-based and community-driven projects around the United States, in Latin America, and throughout the globe on environmental justice, soundscape ecologies, media sovereignty and digital well-being, and community resilience.
I am dedicated to opening and transforming the academy and providing undergraduate and graduate students fruitful and productive experiences to thrive in the multicultural and interconnected world in which they live and work. In order to better support students, I have completed IMPACT and SAFE Zone training at Purdue, regularly mentor student researchers, and have advised service-learning and immersion programs on campus and abroad.
Land Acknowledgement
I acknowledge the traditional homelands of the Indigenous People which Purdue University is built upon. We honor and appreciate the Bodéwadmik (Potawatomi), Lenape (Delaware), Myaamia (Miami), and Shawnee People who are the original Indigenous caretakers.and other Indigenous Nations. I pay my respects to the ancestors, elders, and relations past, present and emerging.
Purdue University is located near Prophetstown State Park and the Tippecanoe Battlefield, two historic areas where leaders Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa took an important stand during colonization uniting Native Peoples in the region. To learn more, I encourage you to engage with the We Shall Remain series, the Are you Planning to do a Land Acknowledgement post, other resources on territorial acknowledgements, and the American Indian College Fund.
Check out the NAECC programming to learn more!
Specializations
Feminist Political Ecology | Environmental Justice | Collaborative Research and Praxis | Media Ecologies | Indigenous Activism and Rights | Visual and Digital Anthropology | Critical Data Studies
Learn more
American Anthropological Association
Anthropology and Environment Society
Association of American Geographers
Center for World Indigenous Studies
IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
Society for Visual Anthropology
