I am a PhD Candidate at the UC San Francisco - UC Berkeley Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology, and a student affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley. I have served as a student lead of the REPAIR Project (REParations and Anti-Institutional Racism) at UCSF. Currently, I hold the UCSF UC Dissertation-Year Fellowship for 2025-2026. I am a medical and environmental anthropologist who investigates the environmental racism and the multi-species impacts of the afterlives of slavery in the Caribbean.
Outside of my research and academic teaching, I am a RYT-200-hour certified yoga teacher who teaches vinyasa, hatha, and restorative styles of modern postural yoga. In my yoga teaching, I focus on combining bodily postures (asanas), breathing techniques (pranayama), and meditation to improve health and well-being.
Special Interests
Anthropology of science; human-environment entanglements; Critical Race Theory; Queer Feminist Approaches to Anthropology; environmental racial justice; Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Caribbean literature; post-colonial theory; STS; consent; uncanny; multi-species ethnography; invasive animals; haunting; ethnographic and qualitative research; supernatural relations
Dissertation Research
What does it mean for people and animals to be labelled as problems? My dissertation, “Primates and Plantation Futures: Unsettling Science, Race, and Consent on St. Kitts,” examines this question by re-framing the issue of invasive green monkeys on St. Kitts, a predominantly Black Caribbean island. Kittitian people and green monkeys suffer from food insecurity, a phenomenon locally known as “the monkey problem.” Scientists, veterinarians, policymakers, and primatologists have sought to address the monkey problem since the abolition of sugar plantations on St. Kitts in 2004, but have been unsuccessful. I conducted 16 months of ethnographic inquiry, archival research, and semi-structured interviews with interlocutors across farms, laboratories, local archives, and eco-tourist destinations. I posit that the monkey problem presents as a site of uncanny relations, in which the illusion of human mastery over the self and others is continually compromised. My research on the monkey problem reveals how the designation of people and animals as problems is used to justify the reproduction of plantation logics predicated on non-consent and violence.
By unsettling science, race, and consent on St. Kitts, my research makes three distinct contributions to anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and related fields. First, in conducting discourse analysis of descriptions of rigor and animal welfare in scientific experimentation, I contend that technical jargon is used to reproduce culturally informed beliefs that certain people and animals are problems under the guise of objective scientific knowledge. Second, I build on emerging Caribbean calls for environmental racial justice to argue that environmental racism is sustained through the persistent logics of the former plantation economy, which continue to affect everyday life. Third, my research asserts that only by attending to the non-consents of people and animals who are silenced by unequal power relations can we move away from reproducing plantation logics and embrace queer feminist and decolonial visions for the future.