My personal research interests center on underrepresented histories, the personal as political, the questioning of state and other powers, and making visible multiple community forms of contestation, storytelling, and action. I work with data, documentation, and narratives.
writing
My written work addresses questions of power – particularly tracing the operations of state power and social memory through language, materiality, and forms of documentation. I have explored these and similar issues in book chapters, co-authored journal articles, and creative written works, as well as in my dissertation The Afterlives of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, and the Visibility of U.S. Human Rights Violations in the ‘War on Terror”. In addition, I do professional project reporting and grant writing for nonprofit organizations and have written successful proposals to Ford Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Selected publications are available in PDF form below and a longer list of writing and publications is available on my CV.
data visualization / digital projects
Through data research projects, map-based storytelling, and other digital forms, I have explored issues such as questions of access to healthcare and experiences of violence in relation to space, place, time, and event.
The Personal Is Geopolitical
(digital story, 2019)
Confronting Documentation (metadata digital work, 2018)
Spatial Scales of State Violence (storymap, 2018)
Hearts that Stopped Beating Near Laredo
(qualitative visualization still image series, 2024)
conferences + talks
I have presented work and been part of group panels at a range of conferences – gatherings of academic, activist, technical, and creative communities. I have also acted as a reviewer for the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Cultural Studies Association (CSA), and HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance & Collaboratory). A selection of my presentations and workshops are listed below.
“Visualizing a Contemporary Humanitarian Crisis: Exploratory Mapping of Migrant Deaths from the Unstructured Text of Newspaper Accounts,” co-presented with Molly Miranker. NACIS, 2024. (video)
“Bones and the Materiality of Forensics Discussion – Seminar Fellow Group Discussion Series,” (internal seminar participants’ panel), co-led with seminar colleagues. Within the Forensis Seminar – The New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI), 2023.
“Mapping and Countermapping Borders,” co-presented with Chris Alen Sula. HASTAC
Conference, 2019.
“Every Day After Was September 12th,” Memory Rebound Conference, The New School, 2018.
“Artifacts of Non-Information,” American Anthropology
Association Meeting, 2016.
“The Materiality of Redaction,” Translating Memory and
Remembrance across the Disciplines. SUNY-New Paltz, 2016.
“The Making of Archives in the Aftermath of U.S. Human Rights Violations,” Society for the Anthropology of North America Meeting, 2015.
“Sites & Reflexivity: Narratives at the Manzanar World War II Camp National Historic Site,” Producing History: Place, Memory, & Documentation, The Graduate Center, CUNY. 2011.