P.I.

Research

My research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants, and on how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management. An activist and artist with formal training in ecology, geomorphology, critical social science, and feminist science and technology studies, I currently work as an Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle.

My book Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice explores how a queer-trans-feminist approach can ally with Indigenous praxis to renew human-water-fish relations. You can purchase it now from University of Washington Press, in the Feminism & Technoscience series.

My students and I conduct collaborative research in partnership with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members, and are currently working on the Duwamish and Stillaguamish rivers in Washington and the Scott and Mid-Klamath rivers in California, as well as in the freshwater-saltwater interface around Puget Sound.

PhD work in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley convened a collaborative of scientists and Sonoma County residents to experiment with storing and infiltrating winter rain to increase summer streamflow to benefit juvenile salmon, and exploring the possibilities of collaborating with beavers to create cool refuges for coho.

As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, I drew this field experience together with queer, transgender, and Indigenous theory to theorize how river sciences could work against the Manifest Destiny logics that shape settler environmental governance in the Western US.