I have a background in place-based public health research and started getting interested in the discourse on neighborhood dis/investment in the field. Despite a goal of health beyond the political economy of space, I was curious at how this work reified the very structures it was critiquing.

Therefore, to start building a world where the place you are born no longer is the best determinate of your health, I look at health geographies, political economy, and emotional/relational geographies.

Currently, I’m interested in how Value-Form Theory can be used to critique the categories of spatial political economy. My goal is to display how and why anti-emancipatory categories dominate our science even in nominally critical traditions, such as Marxist Geography. Moving from that critique, I want to look at concrete spatial struggles and relational bonds to place as foundational to the creation of our collective geospatial imaginary. My goal is to work on a critique of neighborhood health research's use of political economy to build a research program that centers both structural and relational/emotional factors with an eye towards participatory knowledge creation.

Current interests: affect theory, urban spatial struggles, affective approaches to neighborhood health, real abstractions, the unity of the critique of political economy and philosophy of (social) sciences

Faculty Advisor: Allison Hayes-Conroy
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