Research
My research is interested in investigating the city as a set of infrastructural, ecological, and sociospatial relations, in order to understand how these relations are changing in a time of climate change and biodiversity loss.
These interests follow along three interrelated research tracks:
- Examining the ways living ecosystems are utilized as infrastructure for purposes of climate adaptation (e.g., nature-based solutions, green infrastructure), including the forms of labor and changes in values this entails, and how these processes reshape the ecological and sociospatial production of the city.
- Investigating urban human-nature relations, particularly the multiple values and negative dimensions (e.g., ecosystem disservices), and how to engage in these in urban planning, design and management.
- Exploring how different methods for understanding human-nature relations—from multispecies ethnography to digital citizen science technologies—shape ways of knowing those interactions, and the implications thereof for scientific practice.
The cross-cutting goal of these research interests is to investigate the (more-than-human) labor of climate adaptation and the various tools, techniques, and values that enable or constrain these efforts, in order to create more just and livable futures for all urban inhabitants.
This interdisciplinary research agenda engages scholarship from diverse fields such as infrastructure studies, urban ecology, more-than-human geographies, feminist science and technology studies, multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of space and place, and political ecology.
I have a degree in cultural anthropology (PhD, University of Kentucky), and have worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen.
I have taught courses on urban nature planning and long-term landscape planning and design. I currently manage the course ‘IT and Green Transitions’ at ITU, and contribute teaching to courses on data ethics and qualitative methods.