My research examines how race, capitalism, settler colonialism, and environmental change shape life in the American West. I study the region as a landscape where promises of abundance, prosperity, mobility, and security confront the material limits of climate change, water scarcity, and economic inequality.

My first research project, based in Arizona, examines the American “good life”: a promise of intergenerational success, post-work leisure, family stability, and cultural belonging. I explore how these ideals endure—and change—as the economic and environmental conditions that have sustained them become increasingly unstable. I examine how people navigate changing conditions and make sense of work, family, responsibility, and the future.

My current research in Southern California examines narratives and beliefs surrounding water governance and environmental politics, focusing on how wealth and racial inequality shape experiences of climate change and access to environmental resources. I am particularly interested in water infrastructure as a site where political economy, environmental uncertainty, and competing ideas of collective responsibility converge.

Related projects examine the gendered labor of caring for aging parents and the social and political consequences of drought in the Lower Colorado River Basin. Across these projects, I use ethnography to connect large-scale structures—including capitalism, racial inequality, and environmental governance—to the intimate worlds in which they are lived.

My methods include oral history and qualitative interviews, focus groups, archival research, and surveys.

Research Support

My research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Work, the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology, and the David R. and Mady W. Segal Fund for Social Sciences Research on Military Personnel.