What does economic growth actually feel like?

What does it mean to describe something as a “resource”?

Why do only some people have to become “resilient,” or “adapt,” while others are free to live their lives as if these times were normal?

These questions preoccupy my research. I’m an anthropologist and environmental studies professor working in the Department of Earth & Environment at Franklin & Marshall College. Most of my research takes place in Peru, particularly the southern Andes and the cities of Arequipa and Lima. I also work in the Maldives and the United States. My scholarship is a long-term effort to understand what economic growth looks like for people as a fact of daily life, with a particular focus on people who have fallen through uneven development’s cracks. Today, the margins and fracture lines of our unevenly distributed abundance run irrevocably through the intensifying climate crisis. This puts climate change front and center in most of my research. Across my ethnographic work in multiple contexts, from micro-development programs to expanding mines to entrepreneurs and environmentalists in the global south, I’m interested in the power dynamics at play in concepts like "resilience," "adaptation," and "sustainability."

At F&M, I’m affiliated with the programs in environmental studies, women, gender, and sexuality studies, science and technology studies, and Latin American and Latinx studies. My courses encompass themes of environmental justice, development, resource globalization, scientific communication, and the dilemmas posed by climate change.

My book Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru is available from Stanford University Press.