Geographer | Political Ecologist | Community Organizer

I am a geographer and political ecologist interested in environmental justice, sustainability, 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 also a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellow, a recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), and a finalist for the University of Hawaiʻi Student Employee of the Year Award.

My research focuses 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 conducting independent ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok, coordinating geography field schools in Khon Kaen and Chiang Mai, and editing and conducting lab experiments for the Department of Horticulture at Kasetsart University in Bangkok. I also served as Conference Chair of the 10th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference.

I’m a community organizer who has worked on issues ranging from fossil fuel divestment to restoring voting rights for Kentuckians with past felony convictions to advocating for collective bargaining rights in higher education as a union organizer in Kentucky and Hawaiʻi.