Research

Image credit: Laura Alvear Roa, who crafted this illustration for the book’s first chapter on primatology and habituation

My first book, Multispecies Selves: Narratives of Justice with Nonhumans (accepted for publication in the Under the Sign of Nature series at the University of Virginia Press), considers how contemporary life writing by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Jane Goodall, and Mark Doty has expanded the borders of the self to include nonhuman beings and it shows how these entangled selves provide a model for reimagining the liberal subject at the center of juridical systems and theories. By doing so, the book proposes modes of multispecies justice that aim to sustain reciprocal relations and produce more livable worlds for diverse beings, humans and otherwise. The first section considers how reciprocal relations with nonhumans create alternative models of selfhood; the second theorizes disruptions to reciprocal relations and entangled selves as violence; and the third asks how human and nonhuman coalitions resist threats to their coexistence. At once contributing to the environmental humanities and ecocriticism, “Entangled Lives” works at the nexus of critical animal studies, autobiography studies, and environmental and ecological justice studies.

My second book project considers displacement as a defining environmental problem of the twenty-first century, one that harms human and nonhuman communities and severely restricts possibilities for coexistence. I consider how the concept of “home” has undergone a resurgence in environmental thought and discourse, at a time when unprecedented numbers of humans and other beings are experiencing displacement from the places, ecologies, and relationships that sustain their sense of being. The project sets out to understand how neoliberal policies have produced global crises of “homelessness,” and to ask how the concept of “home” might provide a rubric for resisting displacement and producing more just and livable worlds