I have explored discourses of fear that demarcate 'dangerous bodies', and resulting lived experiences. My BA thesis examined how welfare reform strategically used fear and disgust to control the fertility of poor women of color. My Geography MA thesis 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. It also examined 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. 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. 

Current research is 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 space? My dissertation addresses the everyday lived experience of such policing, first through mobilities in New York City, then through young black children's experiences in Cincinnati.