I’m an anthropologist and medical, public health sciences, social medicine, and law and political economy researcher. I hold appointments to faculties at Oxford University and MDC. I’m also a fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

My writing elucidates how law, advocacy, and political economy figure health, housing, and environment. I collaborate with a range of academics, practitioners, and policymakers to develop new practices and policy changes that people can employ to improve health, secure housing, access care, and advocate for change. My current work explores how to improve housing security for people living with cognitive impairment and other disabilities in nursing homes and community settings; how advocacy and rights-based approaches can advance human and environmental health in the U.S. and globally; and innovative ways to deploy and fund legal aid systems. I have written about how drug users are fighting to save one another's lives and end the War on Drugs, making life-saving care into thriving politics; the false promises of for-profit federal consent decree police reforms and the case for grassroots politics, not technocrat contractors, being our best chance to reduce police violence and end carceral governance; how ‘informal’ miners in Southern Africa are criminalized by misguided efforts that pose policing and state and corporate violence as solutions to traumas miners and mining communities endure, not sources of violence, illness, and injury in and around mines; and why migrant rights organizations and movements should help migrants access land and the city, not just secure their rights to live in state territory, because, to many migrants, the “right to the city” and to acesss land to live or work, and immigrant rights, are the same. I have also written about anthropological practice and pedagogy and how students can carry out science fiction anthropology to investigate how people and societies decide that some things are possible and others are not.

My work’s been cited in academic research and in popular publications such as The Nation. And I’ve been interviewed-mostly about police reform, harm reduction, and environmental health-by The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, CNN, Boston Weekly, Sacramento Bee, Kentucky Center for Investigative Journalism & WDRB TV.

I teach or have taught administrative law, introductory and cultural anthropology, medical & psychological anthropology, sci fi anthropology, and interdisciplinary classes (e.g. food justice and urban farming, science as/in culture, and experimental humanities). For college instructors, I have created and led workshops on teaching ‘policy across the curriculum,’ ‘debate across the curriculum,’ and ‘community-engaged research.’

Contact me here or via LinkedIn or Bluesky. My latest work is posted to Academia.edu and ResearchGate.