Research
Current and ongoing projects across medical, psychological, and political anthropology.
The U.S. Trucking Industry
This project examines the psychological and structural dimensions of the U.S. trucking industry, with particular attention to occupational health, technology, and workforce politics. It asks how long-haul labor shapes embodied experience, regulatory life, and forms of mobility at the intersection of migration policy and industrial work. Its methods include participant-observation at truck-stop clinics, ride-alongs with drivers, and receiving a Commercial Driver's License to drive a truck.
Behavioral Healthcare Reform
Collaborating with the Berkeley School of Public Health and local county health systems, this multidisciplinary project evaluates the implementation of tiered, non-carceral behavioral health crisis response programs. My analyses have focused on conflicts around establishing crisis care facilities, the intersecting ethics of care and crisis, and the nature of trauma-informed care as a self-perpetuating communicative structure.
The Social Life of the Political Right
This research line examines the philosophical stakes and lived realities associated with claims about bodily autonomy and institutional authority in contemporary sociopolitical movements. One arm of this work investigates the cosmological and theoretical commitments underpinning a grassroots social movement of "conspiracy theorists" in England. A second, related project analyzes the intellectual history, social world, and kinship dynamics of contemporary think tanks in the U.S. Rather than treating these movements as reactionary or fringe, this work utilizes the tools of critical theory and psychological anthropology to analyze them as serious critiques of dominant liberal modes of philosophizing.
Health and Political Precarity in Sahrawi Refugee Camps
In a collaboration with Sahrawi physicians, this work documents the health and political precarity of Sahrawi refugees in Algeria. Drawing on clinical ethnography and collaborative writing, the project examines improvisation in contexts of infrastructural violence and statelessness. In particular, it has considered the flexible nature of statelessness and how improvisation can become both a necessary tool for survival and strategic means of contesting power.