My research is situated at the intersection of phenomenology, political philosophy, and critical prison studies.  I find phenomenological accounts of relational personhood and situated knowledge helpful for grounding political theory in lived experience and making theory accountable to the complexity of political praxis.  In recent years, my research has focused on three main issues:

1) Prisoner Resistance

How have people in solitary confinement managed to resist and survive carceral power, and what can we learn from prisoner resistance movements about broader possibilities for contesting, transforming, and even abolishing carceral logics?  My main points of reference for this project have been the California prison hunger strikes, organized by people in extreme isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in 2011-13, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), an activist group in which Foucault, Deleuze, and other French intellectuals collaborated with prisoners and their families in the early 1970s to amplify the voices of people inside. 

2) Punishment,, Reproduction, and Settler Colonialism

What is the political relation between support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion?  How do medicalized approaches to state execution in the US work in tandem with criminalized approaches to pregnancy, abortion, and substance use, to intensify the gap between lives that must be protected at all cost and lives that are marked as inherently dangerous or disposable?  What is the relationship between genocidal policies to "kill the Indian in the child" and the current crisis of Indigenous hyperincarceration and deaths in custody?  In this book project, I map the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics, carceral power, and settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and the United States. 

3) Carceral Space

How do carceral logics shape spaces beyond prisons, jails, and detention centers, such as suburbs, gated communities, and college campuses?  In this series of articles, I explore the structure of carceral space from a critical phenomenological perspective, drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, as well as social and political theories of space in disciplines such as architecture and design (Eyal Weizman, Leopold Lambert, Oscar Newman), urban studies (Mike Davis, Neil Smith), geography (Ruth Gilmore, Rashad Shabazz), gender studies and critical race studies (Katherine McKittrick, Simone Browne), and sociology (Henri Lefebvre, Bruno Latour).  By “carceral space,” I mean the spatial organization of relationships among bodies and things through practices of criminalization, surveillance, confinement, segregation, and other forms of punitive control.