I am a geographer that examines the biopolitical administration of asymmetrical life, geographies of waste and vulnerability, neoliberal biomedicine, and queer approaches to bureaucracy and ecology. This has included work on decommissioned military landscapes and nuclear natures; environmental and financial disasters; medical geographies and the governance of health inequities; urban spectacles of waste and alternative futures. These diverse and multi-scalar areas are drawn together through an overarching focus on political economy, biopolitics, critical theory, cultural politics, medical humanities, and environmental justice. Collaboration and performative methodologies, such as absurdist humor and institutional mimicry, are part of my practice.

My research has been published in such venues as Theory, Culture & Society, Society and Space, Public Culture, Environmental Humanities, Culture, Theory & Critique, Antipode, Radical History Review, Configurations, Social Semiotics, Liminalities, cultural geographies, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, Occasion, The New Inquiry, and Progress in Human Geography. The forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies will include my chapter on contaminated land redevelopment and racial justice research. The 2012 SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory includes my co-authored chapter (with Stefan Al, University of Pennsylvania) on theories of spectacle and branding. I have also contributed chapters to the edited volumes: Toxic Immanence (forthcoming 2021); Slow Down: How the Arts and Humanities Can reclaim the University from the Cult of Speed (2019); Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine (2017); Global Spectacles (2016); Critical landscapes: Art and the Politics of Land Use (2015); and Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (2015).

Supported by a Quadrant fellowship, my first book Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) utilizes empirical research and creative nonfiction to examine how the biopolitics of war promotes the idea of a postmilitary and postnuclear world, naturalizing toxicity and limiting human relations with the past and the land. Exposing “hot spots” of contamination, in part by satirizing government reports, the book argues that U.S. militarism obscures the domestic remains of war, and seeks to cultivate ethical responses and coalitional possibilities.

My second book Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making (University of Minnesota Press / Manifold open access, 2019), co-authored with Nadine Ehlers (The University of Sydney), examines biomedicine beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices, to question how life-making efforts engage in a deadly endeavor: Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill. Through case studies spanning cancer activism, race-based health, “war on obesity,” anti-aging policy, and greening the dead, the book explores how efforts to “make live” validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability.

I am currently completing a third book, Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, Dross, co-authored with C. Greig Crysler (University of California-Berkeley), that investigates municipal bankruptcy and debt through the lenses of colonial waste epistemologies, racial capitalism, infrastructure studies, and transnational geographies of austerity. The project seeks to rethink urban and architectural theory in relation to foreclosure and bankruptcy conditions, toxic debt, ecologies of segregation, and transformed conditions of citizenship. The book experiments with ficto-critical diagnostic devices, such as the Austericon, Drossometer, Inflatron, and EcoDigestor, to galvanize public humanities engagement with municipal finance and debt. A fourth volume in preparation, entitled Folklore of Operational Banality: Medical Administration and the Biocratic Grotesque (solo-authored), considers intimate everyday forms of violence associated with US-based medical bureaucracy and the power relations of health care interventions and medical geosurveillance that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness.

I am committed to the public humanities and public geographies, with scholarly practices that extend beyond writing/speaking and conventional forms of academic engagement. I co-developed and co-constructed with Sarah Kanouse (Northeastern University) the civic digital infrastructure A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021 launch, Scalar/USC Alliance for Networking Visual Culture)—the beta test and model for the long-term digital humanities project A People’s Atlas of the Nuclear United States. Supported by a Georgetown University 2016 Pilot Research Project Grant, this atlas is an open-source repository of interactive data sets that draws together scholarly essays, narratives of individuals and communities on the front lines of the domestic Cold War, maps and photo-documentation of sites and materials related to the U.S. nuclear complex. The project’s first phase focuses on the state of Colorado and its immediate surroundings, which includes sites and processes representing all stages of the nuclear cycle, from extraction, milling, and processing to the assembly and deployment of weapons to the storage and monitoring of waste. Through the initial geographic lens of Colorado, the Atlas seeks to infuse nuclear public policy and public memory discussions with humanistic forms of inquiry that address the materiality of nuclear production and political affairs.

My collaborative long-term participatory art/research project “The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service” (also with Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University) works at the intersection of art, research, and government policy to address the toxic afterlife of U.S. militarism. National TLC Service projects and the agency’s organizational mission and swag have been included in such venues as: Momenta Arts’ “Institute for Wishful Thinking” (NYC, 2011), “Ecocultures” exhibition (George Mason University, 2011), Figure One Gallery’s “National TLC Service Mobile Field Office” (Champaign, IL, 2013 *solo show), the exhibition “Monument to Cold War Victory” (Cooper Union, NYC, October 2014); “Atomic Landscapes” at IDEA Space (Colorado Springs, CO 2016); “Facing Rocky Flats” exhibition (Canyon Gallery, Boulder, CO and the Denver Public Library, CO 2018); and the Krannert Art Museum’s “Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape” (Champaign, IL 2019-20). A growing list of scholarly work has cited and discussed the National TLC Service project, such as the edited volumes Doom With A View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (2020)and Monument to Cold War Victory (2018) and the journal Hemispheres: Visual Cultures of the Americas (2018).

I currently serve as Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where I teach courses on critical geography, civic geographies, the politics of exhibitions, cultural theory, urban geographies, green politics, mapping and social justice, biomedicine, biopolitics & bio-inequality, racial capitalism and land politics. I have also collaborated with The Phillips Collection on an innovative co-taught course on “Globalization, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Exhibitions.” I received my Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California-Berkeley and hold an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and BA from Case Western University.