I am a writer, researcher, and educator studying how new ties between the biosciences and technological innovation are changing how we understand life in the context of environmental precarity. I write on developing fields like biomimicry, biosensing, and biotechnology and their influence on how we inhabit our environment. I am currently researching the interface between marine science and policy with a focus on tensions between marine conservation and the emerging Blue Economy. The work examines how marine organisms and the materials extracted from them pass through, across, and into the different ecological and epistemological worlds to figure in the production of healthy publics, ecological futures, and promissory economies.
I am also working to finish a book manuscript, Life’s Work: the Politics of Biological Productivity. The manuscript draws on interviews and ethnographic material to show how the biosciences are reshaping life and value by reimagining nonhuman bodies and behaviors as a resource for innovation. Chapters describe several biomimetic and biotech projects, including the making of robotic lobsters, robotic bees, and gecko adhesion, as well as the unmaking of jellyfish.
I have published several articles on biomimicry as well as biosensing with a focus on how these fields are making nonhuman life matter–culturally, economically and politically–in new ways. I’m a contributing co-editor of the volume, Blue Legalities: Life and Laws of the Sea. My writing has also appeared in journals including –South Atlantic Quarterly-, –The Annals of the Association of American Geography-, –Society & Space-, –Theory Culture & Society-, –Acme-, and –Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization-. My paper on –jellyfish and eco-security- in the Anthropocene can also be found in the edited volume, –Animals, Biopolitics, Law-.
I am an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at -Durham University-.