Professional Bio

I hold a joint appointment with Pennsylvania State University’s Rock Ethics Institute and the Department of Geography.  I am committed to understanding the material conditions of peace and justice and I engage with these concerns through a variety of research and teaching projects. At its heart my research seeks to understand the social, political and economic structures that make human lives vulnerable to all manner of exploitations, as well as how oppressed populations use social justice movements to change their material conditions.  Research projects that I have been involved in connect Civil Rights and labor struggles in the U.S. South following the end of segregation, and the way legacies of racism, violence and social activism continue to frame contemporary anti-racist struggles.  My research contributes to literatures on urban spaces, political geographies, justice and historical and cultural geographies. Given the globalizing structure of human vulnerability I contend it is important to see the struggle for social justice, anti-racist activism and human rights in the US within an international framework.  Only through the cultivation of broader international understandings of rights claims can we undertake an academic project that fundamentally transforms human vulnerability while being ethically informed.  The focus on civil rights and violence has led to my engagement with settler colonialism and the legacies of settler societies.  I am always looking for good students and if our research interests broadly align I encourage you to contact me.