bridges

My work as a scholar, like my work on the ground, unfolds through deep and intentional collaborations. Presently, my friends and colleagues Elayne Oliphant, Daniel Vaca, and I are launching a new #mutualaid growing/thinking/learning space, “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid,” with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation. As Dean Spade teaches us, “Mutual aid is present in every crisis.” To contribute to this work, we’ve been guided by Mariame Kaba’s question “When something can’t be fixed, what can we build instead?” and also asking: 1) How can we amplify work that actualizes a world otherwise? 2) Where do we see glimmers of this world taking shape? What we’ve come up with is both an experiment and a laboratory for growing more. Together, we will explore how religion can serve as a creative force for imagining and building the world that must be, against the violence and destruction of our present. If you’d like to be involved, please take a minute to fill out this form to let us know more about you, your work, the projects that inspire you, and your dreams for creating the world anew.

My past collaborative projects have centered on transformative ethnographic praxis. Through the “Otherwise Anthropology” learning laboratory I built with my dear friend and colleague Megan Raschig, we united scholars and activists of social movements in North America, East Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe in sustained conversation. Together, we published a compendium of our ethical tools and methodological challenges as a Cultural Anthropology ‘Theorizing the Contemporary’ series. With my dear friend and colleague Yana Stainova, I co-dreamed a project on “Method-Making in Concert,” through which we undertook fieldwork in tandem and steady conversation to reimagine the possibilities for ethnographic practice when every facet of our work is opened to the intimacies of collaboration. We brought this methodological approach to bear in a graduate seminar we co-taught between McMaster University and Florida State University called, “Collaborative Ethnographies,” and are currently preparing an article for publication.

Through my public events and programming, I continue to strive to leverage my collaborations and relationships to address critical issues in the campus communities of which I am a part. Here are a few of the events and forums I have organized in service to the academy and movements for social change: