I am an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, and director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory.

Plant Studies: Art, Science, and Ecology
With support from an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government and a SSHRC RDI Grant, I convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies. Today the Plant Studies Collaboratory is thriving with over 25 artists, activists, academics, and plant practitioners from around the world initiating new collaborations.

My plant-based research documents the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations. I examine how the phenomena of plant sensing and communication are galvanizing inquiry in both the arts and the sciences, and how people stage their relations with plants in botanical gardens and in ecological restoration projects in urban parks. These tendrils converge in new project I am working on called Seeding Planthroposcenes. 

The Lively Sciences

My first book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands?

Rendering Life Molecular received the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.  Listen to an interview on the book, and to a lively discussion about science and mechanism here.

For more on my past, current, and ongoing research projects click here.

Teaching
My teaching, grounded in decolonial feminist praxis, explores the history of anthropological theory, the anthropology of the senses, the anthropology of science and technology, more-than-human ethnography, feminist technoscience, the intersections of race, gender and science, the craft of scientific practice, and the power of facts in social worlds.

Recent Courses

Nature, Politics, and Difference :: What is Land?

Anthropology of the Senses

Anthropology of Science and Technology

Theory in Social Anthropology

MA Theory in Social Anthropology

PhD Methods in Social Anthropology