Reframing Consciousness, Planetary Collegium. Porto, 2019.
I am an anthropologist, cultural geographer, and sculptor. My work takes place across disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and ultracontemporary art. My research investigates how space – political-economic, haptic, legal, affective – works: How is it thought? What can it do? What does it conspire with or disarticulate from? The central recurring question that underlies my research is how metaphysical infrastructure shapes topologies of violence, relation, and perception across colonial and postcolonial geographies.
I draw on both theoretical and ethnographic methods, animating them with a commitment to dis-alienate knowledge from colonial habit and an ethical imperative to refuse any form that obscures or reproduces historical political violence. I am especially invested in machinic thought, and I write in dialogue with non-representational theory, geopoetics, Black geographies, and the mimetic tradition.
For my doctoral research, I studied how dissociation shapes the persistence of the plantation complex in the Gulf South. My project was sited in and around Yes We Cannibal, a non-transactional project space for new art and thought that I co-founded and have co-directed with my wife, artist Liz Lessner, since 2020.
My dissertation, Marooned in the Swamp of Spots: Space, Dissociation, and Aesthetics, After a Baton Rouge Plantation, draws on the history of mimetic thought to propose the viability of nonrepresentational ethnography for attending to complex social and spatial registers. I foreground ambient unassimilated material that remains unintegrated beyond representation to show how trauma operates at the level of the social body not as a scalar extension of individual trauma or memory, but also through the foreclosure of relation itself. I am currently developing a book manuscript from this work.
In an earlier project, I analyzed a 1999 Māori claim to the radio spectrum as a form of ontological politics that offered decolonial reparation for indigenous territorial sovereignty. This included a critical history of the ether and its transmutation into spectrum as a persistent metaphysical imaginary.
I previously worked in research and development for a cartography company, as well as at meditation centers and artist's residencies. I hold a PhD from the department of Anthropology & Geography at Louisiana State University, an MA in Geography from UCLA, and a BA in Geography from UMass Amherst. I spent a year at UC Berkeley during college where I discovered Human Geography and, more than a decade later, a year at Bristol University before moving to Louisiana.
I live on a homestead in Proctor, Vermont with my wife, my son Gus, and two Louisiana rescue dogs.
