I am a PhD candidate in Sociology and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at UC Berkeley. My primary interests lie at the intersection of environmental social science and the sociology of labor. Informed by environmental history and urban political ecology, my research considers classical social facts like labor relations and urban development as socioecological processes that illuminate how we live on and remake the land.

My dissertation examines the environmental and labor politics of California seaports, in historical political economic context. Seaports spatially condense the networked and competitive logic of global capitalist logistics. Focusing on the Port of Oakland, I study how the physical and social landscape of the Bay Area has been remade by the hand of the competitive political economy of global logistics. As ports across the US, including Oakland, embark on multifaceted decarbonization programs, my research seeks to crack open this ongoing energy transition to reveal the political dynamics of just transitions and climate justice. I analyze the middle-range dynamics of the labor relations of longshoring and trucking, as well as the environmental health and urban development politics of port communities, to question whether green growth policies consolidate or upset existing political coalitions and how energy transitions ultimately become just or unjust.

I'm a graduate affiliate in the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative's Climate Cluster. I'm also a member of the Extractive University Project, a group of University of California sociologists studying the public university from the standpoint of the labor process and labor organizing of graduate student workers. You can learn more about this work, which has been published in Work and Occupations, at our website: extractive-uni.net

I have also studied the internal politics of labor unions and racial and class formation in labor. Prior to beginning my doctoral studies, I worked as a research coordinator at NYU’s Department of Population Health, where I managed two projects studying community-level chronic disease prevention and management.