I am an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist and I seek to understand how environmental governance and management practices across diverse natural resource systems shape opportunities to achieve socio-ecological security. My research sits at the confluence of environmental politics, environmental security, and environmental justice, and I take a human security approach to define socio-ecological security as the human capability to mitigate or end threats to social and environmental rights. I rely heavily on qualitative research methods (interviews, institutional analysis, and participant observation) and extensive fieldwork, an approach which produces contextualized and empirically based scholarship and practice.
I have pursued research on these topics in Afghanistan, Colombia, Ghana, India, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and the United States. At Illinois, research outside of the US has focused on environmental conflict and peacebuilding in Colombia specifically and Latin America broadly. Within the US, I have focused on infrastructure and energy conflict in the Midwest.
