research program
I am an ethnographer working at the intersection of environment, science and technology, and governance in the Western United States. I am interested in questions like: How does the environment become a particular kind of problem, and for whom (or what)? How do different communities see, experience, understand, and respond to problems like water scarcity or climate change, and at what scale?
book project
Based on my dissertation research, my first book project explores the ecological politics and environmental temporalities of California water during the 2011-2017 drought. This regional case study centers on Southern California’s underserved peripheral zones: small at-risk communities in the rural Colorado and Mojave Desert regions. Here, individual towns are geographically and politically isolated; often dependent on sole-source groundwater supplies, while surrounded by an environment in which water is always already scarce (as locals joke, “the desert is always in a drought!”). Water authorities lack the resources and jurisdiction of their urban counterparts, and are frequently left out of county- and state-level policies and planning efforts. Instead, an ad-hoc regional assemblage of activists and water experts navigate a constantly shifting, highly technical process involving diverse stakeholders, deep political allegiances, tangled regulatory agencies, millions of dollars of scientific research, and decades of litigation.
My ethnography follows these resource managers, scientists, public officials, and community activists as they work to understand, protect, and sustain their local water, and with it particular imaginaries of their local way of life. By examining social engagements with and through water in a region notorious for drought, I show that our existing explanatory models of water scarcity and environmental vulnerability are insufficient to understand the lived reality of contemporary ecological politics in the arid West. In telling my interlocutors’ stories, I draw out the environmental temporalities of desert water, heat, and geological materials – as well as lived history, policy timelines, scientific careers, and activist battles – that shape their experiences in and through these extreme desert places, and their efforts to protect communities that seem perpetually at risk of drying up and blowing away.
This work was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UC California Studies Consortium, the UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and the UCI Department of Anthropology. Special thanks to the Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center.
applied work
National Park Service Climate Change Response Program (CCRP)/Cultural Resources
As resource managers develop vulnerability assessments, prioritization frameworks, and adaptation strategies for cultural resources – and potentially decide what they can and cannot save from the effects of climate change – they find themselves needing new ways to collaborate and co-produce knowledge with the people whose culture, heritage, and sense of well-being are directly tied to those resources. Drawing from anthropological research on climate change, I collect stories and experiences from resource managers working through these challenges, and provide technical assistance and guidance on working with park associated communities and local stakeholders in the climate change planning process.
This work is conducted as part of a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship.
Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA) Disadvantaged Communities Involvement Program
I serve as part of a team leading the development of a watershed-scale, mixed methods strengths and needs assessment for SAWPA’s Disadvantaged Communities Involvement Program. This project is a large-scale, high-profile effort to collect and integrate spatial, demographic, and ethnographic data on underserved and underrepresented communities, strengthen engagement, and develop local interventions to increase community wellbeing and promote environmental justice. As lead ethnographer on the team in 2017-2018, I designed and implemented a pilot version of the qualitative components of the project in collaboration with water agency, academic, and social service partners. When complete, this project will serve as a feasibility study for future ethnographically-informed assessments, and help local water agencies develop more equitable practices responding to individual communities’ needs and strengths.
This work is supported by SAWPA’s Disadvantaged Communities Involvement Program and Proposition 1 funding from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).
collaborative projects
“Extremes of Borrego: Biological and Social Life in a Changing Desert Ecosystem”
This interdisciplinary case study is conducted with Daniel Winkler (Plant Ecophysiologist and Evolutionary Ecologist, United States Geological Survey). Using combined ecological and anthropological data, we investigate how environmental extremity drives biological, socio-economic, and cultural life in Anza-Borrego and nearby desert communities. We ask: how are desert plants and desert people connected through their shared dwelling in an extreme, water-scarce environment? How do we think about vulnerabilities under climate change, risk mitigation, and drought response in places already at environmental extremes?
Water UCI
Water UCI is a campus-wide, transdisciplinary research initiative on theoretical and applied water science, technology, and policy. In 2014-2015, I served as a Research Fellow for Team Water UCI, a graduate student thought group on drought monitoring, greening and browning, and desert conservation. In 2015-2016, I served as a Graduate Research Assistant for a Water UCI project investigating the historical relationship between water insecurity, water policy, and water attitudes in California, and building capacity for future interdisciplinary research agendas.
“Desalination and Sublime Water Worlds in the California Desert and the Dead Sea”
This collaborative ethnographic project is conducted with Simone Popperl (Anthropologist, UC Irvine). Together, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the network of environmental scientists, policy makers, and community members connected through our two field sites (the Dead Sea and the Southern California desert) to explore imaginaries of desalination in the high stakes context of global water scarcity and increasing climate change.