My current research examines border securitization in the northern Caribbean, Haitian maritime commerce, seafaring knowledge, ethico-legal geographies, material semiotics of racialization, logistics, pragmatic performances of evidentiary disputes, political and ritual economies of privately-run Haitian lotteries, popular responses to the 2010 Haitian cholera epidemic, as well as other topics. Check out the "news" section of this site for announcements of upcoming talks and forthcoming articles.
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM Advanced Seminar "An Oceanic Anthropology for the Near Future" Co-organized with Sharad Chari, UC Berkeley, Geography June, 2025
This seminar will explore how opportunities to think from and with aquatic realms might invigorate new creative currents in anthropological concept making and ethnographic inquiry suited to the challenges of our global present and near future. Despite anthropology’s foundational entanglements with the sea, the discipline has long leaned toward characterizing consequential human sociality as that which unfolds on firm land, thereby relegating oceans to the status of in-between, asocial voids. This tendency divides the vast majority of the planet’s surface from terrestrial theatres of authentic human drama while too-often neglecting the terraqueous practices unfolding aboard vessels, at the water’s edge, and in the water itself. By bringing together 10 scholars pioneering new approaches to maritime anthropology across the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean, this seminar will examine how oceanic ethnography and its immersive approaches to aquatic field sites can offer innovative theoretical insights for anthropological and ethnographic inquiry. The edited volume that will emerge from this seminar will explore the necessity of recentering the sea in anthropological thinking about race, capitalism, empire, more-than-human ecologies, and labor while also contributing to a broader “oceanic turn” in the social sciences and humanities.
Further information for seminar participants is available here.