Research

More than a decade of research in Haiti and diasporic spaces resulted in the publication of my first book, The Sexual Politics of Empire, as well as a handful of publications about the daily lives and activism of same-sex desiring and gender creative Haitians. Though this research has concluded, I am still active with the Haitian Studies Association Sexualities Working Group.

The traditional model of ethnographic fieldwork relies on hypermobile researchers negotiating their informants’ immobilities, a residue of the interrelated white, colonial, masculinist, and ableist design of anthropology. “Enabling Ethnography” argues that a greater diversity of researcher bodyminds enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. Developed from two research projects—one an experiment in anti-ableist research design about universities and racial inequality, the other an oral history project with disabled anthropologists—this project additionally makes a significant methodological contribution in terms of thinking through the details of disability accessibility and collective access in ethnographic fieldwork. 

This collaborative interdisciplinary research project examines a neighborhood at the University of Minnesota where home ownership was originally limited to tenured faculty. I am writing a book with Professor Miranda Joseph that will be the first one to address faculty housing in critical university studies. The book contributes to American universities’ reckoning with settler colonialism and their own racial histories and scholarship. We consider “faculty” as a racialized category of professional managerial class workers and engage scholarship on the financial and managerial strategies of universities and their role as impactful property owners that shape U.S. cities.