Biography
I am an artist, educator, and scholar working on a range of projects related to care, including with the more-than-human world.
I hold a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where I examined how children, both real and imagined, are positioned in the political project of addressing climate change and how social actions around climate change affect ideas about children. My dissertation titles Children in Absentia: Reproductive Futurism in the Era of Climate Changeasked, what does it look like to politicize “the child” in climate activism? I studied how movements such as “BirthStrike” explicitly positioned the decision to not have children as a political response to climate change, calling on people to strike from childbearing and rearing. I also examined the transnational school strikes for climate that began in 2018, organized and carried out by youth activists. By focusing on the mutually constitutive ideas of “child” and “climate crisis,” my research aims to enrich the narratives of climate change, question core assumptions, and re-frame children and the reproductive discourses through which they are often defined. Pieces related to this work have been published in Edge Effects; International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Childhood Studies, and Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online. I am also a member of the In/Fertile Environments Working Group and an Associate-at-Large at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment.
Another strand of my current research centers on feminist approaches to qualitative methods and the norms of knowledge production. Recently I was a Visiting Scholar in Anne Pasek’s Low Carbon Research Methods Group, and I worked with Kate Elliott to virtually convene an international group of researchers to think about carbon-intensive expectations and norms, and to consider justice-driven alternatives.
Currently, I am a 2022-2024 Leading Edge Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) working with Caring Across Generations to advocate for care infrastructure in the United States. Additionally, I maintain a strong commitment to the arts, drawing on my theater and performance training at Interlochen Arts Academy; The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; and New York University. Towards this end, I have co-designed several community-based arts programs and am involved in several ongoing artistic collaborations. I am also co-editor of the BECOMING Series and an affiliate with Dr. Erica Halverson’s Learning in the Making Lab.
