My dissertation research considers the ongoing colonial histories and effects of
industrial fishing nets made from monofilament plastic that have been lost and
abandoned around the island of Newfoundland. Known globally as ghost nets, I
seek out the social and political histories of these lost nets, investigating the
ways they entangle individual lives and multispecies communities with rural
development schemes and larger histories of resource extraction in the
Atlantic world. By thinking with ghost nets, I ask what it means to live today in
the wake of environmental disaster and what it might take to support rural
resource dependent communities in the present.
This work is guided by my broader interest in the relationship between social
inequality and environmental change. As an educator, I co-designed and teach
a Yale College anthropology seminar entitled Inequality and the Anthropocene:
Thinking the Unthinkable. I have also served as a Teaching Fellow for Yale
College seminars Inequality in America and Multispecies Worlds. Each of these
courses fosters conversations about the profound intersectionality of
inequality and environmental change. To facilitate these conversations, I serve
as a Pedagogy Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and
Transnational Migration.
With the support of the Fulbright Foundation and the National Geographic
Society, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, worked on fishing boats,
and recorded oral histories in small fishing communities of New Brunswick,
Canada, Midcoast Maine, USA, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the
Shetland Islands in Scotland. I am excited by the environmental humanities
more broadly, and I strive to communicate my research beyond academia
through art, creative nonfiction writing, and my continued involvement with
the National Geographic Society as a community hub coordinator for women
working in anthropology, archeology, and related fields.