I am originally from Calgary, Alberta but now live in North Bay, Ontario with my husband and three children.  I am currently an associate professor of Anthropology at Nipissing University.

I am interested generally in the political ecology of environmental governance in the Canadian north. My research centres on how institutional logics and framings of environmental management are negotiated and contested by local people, and how incongruences are resolved (or not resolved) within environmental decision-making. I explore how technocratic constructions of the impacts of resource development, and other environmental problems, are situated within wider discourses, technologies, and processes of regulation that are related to forms of governmentality and coloniality. I am especially concerned with how these contrast with the experiential, symbolic, and affective attachments that people have to particular places. My work has been mostly with Indigenous communities in the Canadian north: I have worked with Dene communities in the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories on issues surrounding consultation and the assessment of intensified oil and gas activities on their lands. I also work with Anishinaabe communities in northern Ontario on the ways in which risk calculation around water quality is constructed by the state, and how water is known and experienced by community members. I am also interested in collaborative research methodologies and trying new ways to understand peoples knowledges and experiences of place, especially the ways in which these are rooted in emotions, community, identity, and well-being.

I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Alberta in 2010, and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of History and Geography at Nipissing University from 2010-2012.