Across my career, my innovative and boundary-spanning work has blended social science and humanities approaches to explore how humans shape and are shaped by the more-than-human world. Theoretically rigorous and increasingly community engaged, my research challenges us to rethink our relationship with nature by recognizing nonhuman actors as agents. By revealing the cultural, political, and historical processes that shape our encounters with the nonhuman world, my research unsettles taken for granted binaries of human and animal, wild and domestic, and ultimately, nature and culture. This is significant not only for environmental scholarship, but also for policy, conservation practice, and public discourse. I develop a critical framework for advancing environmental justice and offer scholarship that provides tools for more ethical, empathetic, and politically-engaged relationships, vital to reimagining future human-nonhuman relations grounded in mutual flourishing and understanding.

Wolves and the Making of Canada

Broadly, my current research project considers the way in which the natural world becomes a space of political calculation; more specifically, I am working with the notion of wolves as agents in shaping history, policy and discourse. As such, this project brings together environmental policy, wolf biology, Canadian studies, animal geographies and environmental history to think about how wolves have figured in making of the Canadian nation. What this project tries to understand is how the wolf has always been implicated in the formation of Canada, first as a physical threat to traders and settlers, next as an invader that stole land, livestock and resources, and finally as a source of national pride, an exemplar of wilderness and a subject of conservation measures to regulate its own well being. Drawing together examples from trappers accounts, government archives, popular literature and scientific scholarship, I chart the ways that wolves have moved from villain to vermin to wildlife ambassador, but nonetheless remain a focal point for specific kinds of regulation. In so doing, I explore the trajectory, extent, and limits of this reimagining of the wolf in Canada.  

This work has now been published in the book Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2022).

Cultural Peceptions of Coyotes

I am currently working on a book entitled Wily: A Cultural History of Coyotes, which explores the complicated place that coyotes occupy in North American life and the cultural meanings they carry. Wily makes the case that figuring out how to live better with coyotes offers a model for coexistence in an increasingly environmentally compromised world. Unlike my previous books, it is not geared toward an academic audience. Instead, it is pitched toward a general reader who has an interest in—or perhaps has had a conflict with—coyotes. Wily invites readers to see coyotes as resilient creatures who might act as guides for modes of living that respect rather than imperil biodiversity. In so doing, I make the case that such a reconceptualization would improve not only the lives of coyotes and other wildlife, but also our own.

Multispecies Climate Justice

With Sylvia Cifuentes and Shaina Sadai, I have edited a soon to be released book entitled Multispecies Climate Justice: Liberatory Futures for Human and More-than-Human Worlds. This edited book offers a collection of chapters from critical social science, humanities, and science scholars that both deepen and provide specificity to conversations about forms of justice that begin from the understanding that plants and animals are agential beings with interests that often coincide with needs of people made vulnerable by climate change.