I am a feminist political geographer and professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My work is animated by a desire to understand how our ordinary lives put the work of territorialization in motion, to change how we operate as scholars and teachers in academic spaces, and to think our discipline’s core ideas more capaciously to engage with Black, Indigenous, anticolonial, and queer of color theorization.
I have theorized intimacy as fundamentally geopolitical, coining the term “intimate geopolitics,” and capped off a decade of research on this work in the Ladakh region of India with a monograph, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (2020). I have furthered this line of inquiry by focusing on right wing politics as an embodied masculinist politics of fear and futurity that infuse our contemporary global life. In addition, I have co-edited a volume on feminist geography, Feminist Geography Unbound (2021), which highlights the work of both junior and senior scholars who push the subdiscipline to engage with Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, and other critical approaches to feminist geography.
I teach in global environmental justice, political geography, qualitative methods, South Asia, and regular graduate seminars on territory and decolonizing methodologies. I am involved in numerous collaborations, from research groups with colleagues from across institutions and disciplines to partnerships with local artist collectives in Leh, Ladakh.