My Research

I am an environmental anthropologist who studies food and agriculture systems in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America. Food and farming are starting places to ask fundamental questions concerning how we learn about the world around us, how we come to shape the landscapes where we live, and even what impact our culture has on the microscopic worlds within us.

My research has led me to explore the human experiences behind biotechnology and organic agriculture in India, heritage foods and climate change in Bosnia’s mountain gardens, the decisions and aspirations of the next generation of Midwestern farmers, and the influence of food traditions and fermentation on the human microbiome. To study these issues and examine the changing social and ecological worlds where we live, I use a social science toolkit that includes ethnography, spatial analysis, interviews, surveys, ethnobotany, and photography.

Environmental knowledge, and the relationships and affects that continually shape it, grow within a larger political context that includes everything from biotechnology to microbial legislation to ethical supply chains. My work in anthropology uses seeds and microbes as heuristics to explore how we shape and are shaped by the social, political, economic, and ecological worlds around us.

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The Global Lives of Indian Cotton

June 30, 2020

The Global Lives of Indian Cotton is an international digital humanities storytelling project to describe the full cotton commodity chain from seed to second-hand clothing. Using Esri Storymap software, this website allows visitors to explore cotton’s ties around the world in the words and photos of the people who create it <link>