PhD, Geography, University of Kentucky

Certificate in Social Theory, University of Kentucky

MA, Socio-Legal Studies, The International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain

MA, Geography, Syracuse University

BA, Geography and Women's and Gender Studies, Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon

I have explored discourses of fear that demarcate 'dangerous bodies', and resulting lived experiences. My first article in Gender, Place, and Culture examined how welfare reform deployed fear and disgust to control the fertility of poor BIPOC women. My MA research at Syracuse analyzed the convergence of experimental policies of social control within a neighborhood, focusing on the everyday experience of those whose bodies, behaviors, and mobility is criminalized. I also focused on how a conditional cash transfer addressed issues of national and global security at the scale of the household and the body. My Socio-Legal MA thesis examined social control through emplacement and ex-placement in an urban park. To banish the fear once associated with Bryant Park, design and marketing strategies branded elements like trash as in-place, while marking certain bodies and behaviors as 'unclean' and 'unsafe' and thereby out of place. 

My dissertation research focused on police strategies of containment and control, particularly crime mapping, hot-spots-policing, biometric data gathering, and police street-stops. I investigate how such tactics at times literally reach into the body, investigating, disciplining, and recording biometric, social, and spatial data. How is this technological profiling experienced in everyday life? In what ways do 'dangerous' bodies move through or become constrained within public city space? This was the topic of my article in Political Geography. I have since conducted fieldwork with children and police in Cincinnati, focusing on children's embodied experiences of policing and surveillance, and their everyday refusals of such securitizing regimes.