��ɫ��Ƶ

I completed my PhD (2017) in Geography at the University of British Columbia with a dissertation about slum-upgrading and pacification projects in Rio de Janeiro’s favela communities. I received both my BA/BPHE (2008) and MA (2011) at Queen’s from the Department of Kinesiology and Health Studies, where I focused on critical sport and health sociology. My employment experience has primarily been in the fields of institutional equity and urban women’s health. Before coming (back) to Queen’s I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.

Having grown up in Toronto, I am fascinated by the dynamics and politics of the “urban.” My interests in cities range from sport mega events to slum upgrading to the social determinants of health. While my research is global, I remain grounded in the politics and pedagogies of my home on unceded and treatied Indigenous territories, be it in Toronto, Vancouver, or Kingston.

I currently live in Kingston with my partner, Mark and our dog, Lucy. Outside of work I can often be found fumbling around on the fiddle, reading novels, or looking for local pick-up soccer games.

Credentials:

• PhD – University of British Columbia (Geography)
• MA, BA/BPHE – Queen’s University (Kinesiology and Health Studies)

Links:

Research Interests:

My scholarly work unpacks practices of urban economic development in cities across the world. It builds relationships between anticolonial urbanism, feminist STS, urban political ecology, racial capitalist geographies, and conjunctural urbanism.

My research program is largely organized around the social and economic dynamics of urban infrastructure. I ask questions such as:

• How do Big Tech and data infrastructure shape the uneven exchange of genomic material for public health governance?
• How do zoonotic biosurvelliance programs re-configure the labour of people in Northern and Southern cities and with what implications for safety and justice?
• How does non-valued metabolic work – such as breastfeeding – become distributed through urban infrastructures of infant feeding?
• How do low-income communities grapple with slum upgrading efforts and sport mega event infrastructural development?

The geographic focus of this research is relatively broad, taking me to North America, South America, and Africa.

My most recent SSHRC-funded work sits at the intersection of biocapital, biosecurity, urban political ecology, and digital geographies. With Dr. Rafi Arefin at the University of British Columbia I look at how wastewater surveillance has positioned waste as a vital and valuable source of bioinformation, with myriad impacts on urban health governance. We are particularly interested in the data justice implications of this ‘new’ technology. I am also working on a book project about infectious disease surveillance and data colonialism.  

Curriculum Vitae (PDF 383 KB)