B.Sc. in Global Resource Systems, Faculty of Land and Food System, UBC, 2008
M.Sc. Comparative and International Education, Wolfson College, University of Oxford, 2010
I am a white settler scholar whose research asks how political ontology and trauma studies can help us understand the colonial traps that structure responses to social and ecological crises. My dissertation takes up Glen Coulthard’s critique of the politics of recognition and Mario Blaser’s theorization of political ontology to identify what I call the wholeness trap: the assumption that colonial wounds can be reconciled through a return to balance, healing, or closure. I’m also an Autistic researcher, and mama to four children!
I am committed to developing frames of inquiry that resist the pacification of rupture and affect, and that instead attend to the relational, psycho-affective, and ontological dimensions of colonial power. This entails critically examining discourses that demand resolution — whether through reconciliation, resilience, or trauma-informed policy — and showing how they risk reproducing the very structures of domination they claim to transcend. In the context of climate justice, I explore how these discourses shape national frameworks for adaptation, resilience, and transition, and how they obscure land, rupture, and more-than-human relations.
My current research is focused on a comparative close reading of Coulthard and Blaser, with illustrative Canadian case studies (such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action and federal climate frameworks) to demonstrate how the wholeness trap operates in both Indigenous–state relations and climate governance. Beyond the dissertation, I situate my work in dialogue with Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial scholars, and I understand research as a collaborative practice of encountering and being taught by the cracks, wounds, and relational obligations that colonial modernity seeks to erase.
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
UBC President’s Entrance Award
Olof Sjobom Seaholm Memorial Scholarship
education; trauma studies; decolonial, land-based learning; healing