Research Interests: Anthropology of Science; more-than-human entanglements; multi-species ethnography; Critical Race Theory; Queer Crip Theory; Critical Disability Studies; Medical Anthropology; Queer Feminist Approaches to Anthropology; environmental racism; supernaturecultures; Caribbean studies; invasive animals; post-colonial theory; STS; consent; uncanny; haunting
About:
I am an anthropologist who conducts ethnographic research on the multi-species impacts of the afterlives of slavery in the Caribbean. My research examines the everyday manifestations of post-colonial transitions and environmental racism, as they are experienced on St. Kitts. I engage political and theoretical debates about humanist, racial, and animal liberation in the Caribbean and beyond. For my dissertation research, I investigated the contemporary entanglements between humans and invasive green monkeys as they play out in plantation futures — the contemporary reconfiguration of plantation lands and logics — since the abolition of plantations on St. Kitts in 2004. In my dissertation, “Primates and Plantation Futures: Unsettling Science, Race, and Consent on St. Kitts,” I theorize that the so-called monkey problem presents as a site of uncanny relations, wherein Kittitian people and monkeys are haunted by the afterlives of slavery, fantasies of scientific objectivity, and intertwined histories of speciesism and racism. Positing uncanny relations brings together anthropological theories of the uncanny with questions in medical anthropology about the relationship between biology, environment, and culture. In daily life, these hauntings manifest as cyclical struggles for interpersonal (and inter-species) consent and refusal. I argue that existing frameworks for consent fail to account for uneven power relations. I offer a novel framework called affective consent, formulated through a multi-species lens, which has scholarly and political ramifications for humanist, racial, and animal liberatory futures. In my future research, I will continue to question the scholarly and political ramifications of affective consent for human-animal-environment relations