Geographer | Political Ecologist | Community Organizer

I am a geographer and political ecologist interested in environmental justice, sustainability, and Southeast Asia. My research examines the cultural economy of urban sustainability transitions. I specialize in plastic circular economies in Bangkok, Thailand, focusing on competing environmental value systems that materialize in the circular economy and the limits to capital-driven growth. My research agenda broadly asks, “What do plastic circular economies sustain, and for whose benefit?”

I hold a Ph.D. in Geography and Environment from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. 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. My doctoral research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS). I earned an M.A. in Geography from the University of Kentucky, and a B.S. in Geographic Science from James Madison University.

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.