I am an anthropologist conducting research on narratives and beliefs surrounding water governance and environmental politics in Southern California, with particular attention to how wealth disparities shape experiences of and responses to climate change. I received my doctorate from the University of Chicago, where I won the Marion R. and Adolph J. Lichtstern Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in Anthropology.

My research and writing examine the ideologies, infrastructures, and affects of living in the desert west amid climate change and conditions of economic and political precarity. I work at the intersections of political-economic anthropology, environmental anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, drawing on feminist theory to ask how capitalism and racial inequality shape relationships among people, environments, and institutions. Race is central to my approach: I am interested in how racialized histories of land, property, and belonging become embedded in environmental policy and infrastructure, as well as in the everyday narratives through which people understand inequality and environmental change.

I am committed to ethnography as a mode of sustained attention—to the contradictions of everyday life, to the meanings people make of their circumstances, and to forms of knowledge that can be overlooked by institutional and political accounts. My ethnographic practice is grounded in listening, relationship-building, and a commitment to taking seriously the perspectives and expertise of the people with whom I work. I see ethnography not only as a method of research, but also as an ethical and analytical practice that can illuminate how large-scale political and economic forces are lived and contested in ordinary worlds.

I am equally committed to teaching as a collaborative and rigorous intellectual practice. In the classroom, I aim to make social theory accessible without sacrificing its complexity, and to create spaces where students can develop their own analytical voices. I teach students to approach ethnographic and theoretical materials with curiosity and precision, to question assumptions about culture and inequality, and to connect anthropological concepts to the world. My teaching is informed by a commitment to inclusive pedagogy and to helping students recognize their own experiences and observations as potential starting points for critical inquiry.

My first research project took place in Arizona and focused on the afterlives of American ideologies about family, climate, and work in the twenty-first century. This research continues to inform my broader interest in how people navigate changing economic and environmental conditions, and how ideas about responsibility, prosperity, family, and place become reorganized in moments of uncertainty.