My Research Agenda
Using approaches from environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and feminist theory, I examine how scientific narratives about the future of nature are interwoven with stories about human identities, communities, and futures.
I research how cultural ideas of race, gender, and sexuality influence the ways scientists frame their research on environmental issues, and, conversely, how scientific rhetoric shapes discussions about the future of humanity and nature in environmental activism and popular culture.
My research exposes the authoritative yet often unanalyzed narratives that inform the ways scientists conceptualize environmental change, policymakers respond to environmental crises, and the public understands environmental issues in relation to social inequalities.
The Sex Lives of Endangered Species: Gender and Sexuality in Representations of Biodiversity Loss
My book manuscript, The Sex Lives of Endangered Species: Gender and Sexuality in Representations of Biodiversity Loss, analyzes how scientists and the media use gendered rhetoric to depict the reproduction of endangered species in the context of the biodiversity crisis. I find that cultural ideas of gender and sexuality influence how scientists narrate their research on species extinctions and, conversely, that scientific rhetoric shapes discussions in popular culture about the future of biodiversity and humanity.
For example, one chapter details scientific research on the “feminization” of the sexual anatomy of endangered frogs exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals and alt-right political discourse that claims that these “gay” and “transgender” frogs are evidence of the decline of American heterosexual masculinity. These scientific and popular discourses encode cultural anxieties about perceived threats of environmental pollution to binary gender/sex and the maintenance of heteronormativity. Using frameworks from queer ecologies and feminist science studies, the book argues that biodiversity discourse, broadly defined, both draws on and reinforces what I call male extinction anxiety, or the fear of an imperiled future for masculinity and heterosexuality.
Throughout the book, I contend that cultural norms about gender and sexuality shape the ways we imagine environmental futures—and if we break with those norms, we can imagine different futures for humanity and nature in the context of the biodiversity crisis. My analysis points to the possibility of reshaping current scientific research agendas and crafting a biodiversity science compatible with feminist values and ethics.
This book manuscript has been solicited by Duke University Press. See a portion of this research published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.
Migration Is Natural: Conservation Biologists and the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall, 1993-2021
While my first book manuscript focuses on the interface between scientific and media representations, my second book project examines the interplay between science and activism. My book project, Migration Is Natural: Conservation Biologists and the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall, 1993-2021, examines the entangled histories of conservation biology and border militarization in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The book analyzes how the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall through national parks between 1993, at the beginning of the Clinton administration's large-scale border fence construction project, and 2021, at the conclusion of the Trump administration’s expansion of the border wall, has shaped biodiversity conservation in the region. Using archival research and oral history interviews, I analyze the production and circulation of scientific research about the environmental effects of border barrier construction through national parks and the consequences for the endangered species that live there. Bringing together approaches from environmental history and history of science, this book also investigates how scientific knowledge production intersects with political controversies and social movements surrounding the environmental ramifications of border militarization.
For example, one chapter details how environmentalist opposition to U.S.-Mexico border wall construction under the Trump administration intersected with queer and feminist social movements in the borderlands. I show how conservation biologists, environmentalists, and human rights activists formed novel coalitions that adopted the image of the monarch butterfly as a symbol of social justice and environmentalism in the borderlands. Feminist and queer activists also utilized the butterfly as a symbol of political transformation and queer migrant identity.
My research contributes to the environmental humanities by analyzing the nuanced and sometimes contradictory history of conservation biology as both complicit in the production of the nation-state and critical of the environmental consequences of national borders. This book project also deepens our understanding of the role of scientist-activists in creating political change through involvement with social movements, and finds that some, but all, of these activists and scientists frame the biodiversity crisis in ways that contrast narratives found in popular culture.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies Standard Research Grant. See a portion of this research in a forthcoming Environmental Humanities article.
The Future Is Species-Queer: World-Making in the Age of Extinction
My future research examines emerging models in theoretical ecology that provide a relational account of biodiversity loss. Recent scientific research characterizes biodiversity loss in terms of “extinction cascades,” “co-extinctions,” or “chains of extinction,” which are concepts that describe how when one species goes extinct, so do all the other species that depend on them.
I am especially interested in research on “ecosystem collapse” which characterizes biodiversity loss in terms of the loss of entire ecosystems, as well as conservation initiatives to prevent the extinction of these “endangered ecosystems.” For example, as coral reef biologists note, the entire coral reef ecosystem could be extinct by 2050 due to climate change and ocean acidification.
I interpret these models of ecosystem collapse in conservation biology using the concept of “world-making” in queer of color critique (Munoz 2009) and the environmental humanities (Rose 2011). I ask: Can relational theories of biodiversity loss work to redefine what is at stake in the modern extinction crisis?