I am a cultural geographer who explores the geopolitics of knowledge production. That I often pursue this historically may relate to my BA in history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My fascination with the cultural geographies of technoscience surely stems from earning an MA in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma. And the fact that my PhD in geography is from the University of Kentucky helps explain why I undertake my scholarship with feminist and other critical methodologies.
My research has examined the organizational geographies and cultural politics of development and conservation in Indigenous regions of Mexico. With archival investigation, visual interpretation, and ethnographic inquiry, I tend to ask how the access and use of communication technologies amplifies Indigenous participation in the authorship of authoritative geographic knowledge. Because I think video is a particularly effective platform for co-constituting environmental knowledge, my fieldwork has focused on how and why cultural activists work with academic advocates to create and circulate videos made by, with, and for Indigenous communities. I am especially interested in the gendered nature of these collaborations, as well as the visualizations of Indigeneity they enable.
In 2012, I had the opportunity to bring some of what I learned in southern Mexico to the southern plains where I now live and work. Thanks to funding from the agency now called the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, I waded into the waters of climate science to coordinate five Inter-Tribal workshops in its service region, and to pursue a participatory video project that might mediate pluricultural conversations about climate change impacts in Tribal communities in the central USA. This video project unfolded very differently from how I had envisioned. But in 2014, it resulted in Listening for the Rain a 22-minute video seen by thousands of online viewers. I coproduced this documentary with long-time partner, Filo Gómez, an Ayuujk media maker from Oaxaca (now land change scientist), and Kiowa filmmaker, Jeffrey Palmer.
That video project introduced me to the work undertaken by Tribal environmental professionals (TEPs). Post-tenure and promotion, I had the luxury of slowly developing a geohumanities approach to studying the emergence of Tribal environmental programs in Oklahoma during the 1990s from the perspective of TEPs, the individuals designing and developing these initiatives. During 2017, I started working with Native students at OU to create video portraits of TEPs who live and work in Oklahoma. Over the course of two years, we coproduced and screened short profiles of two Native women in charge of Tribal environmental programs; you can view and read more about the videos here. These two videos led to funding from the Tribal TAB program at Kansas State University to create a third video portrait. Not only did this support allow me to continue working with one of the now-graduated students, Loren Waters (Kiowa and Cherokee), but also with FireThief, a Native owned production house in Tulsa. Together we coproduced the short film Restoring Néške’emāne. It’s not yet available for online viewing (because Loren is screening it in film festivals), but you can learn more about this 2021 production soon.
I continue to pursue video coproduction as I develop my book project focused Tribal environmental sovereignty in the settler state of Oklahoma. I have also embarked on another geohumanities project with a crackerjack team of young researchers and in collaboration with departmental colleagues and the Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD) Agency. To learn about environmental justice issues in the northeast corner of the state comprised of Ottawa and Delaware Counties, we are interviewing people about their experiences of air, water, and work in this region. No doubt we will hear about the Tar Creek Superfund Site, the B.F. Goodrich plant in Miami, OK that operated for 40 years (1946-1986), the more recent explosive growth of poultry feeding operations (PFOs), and flooding associated with the construction of the Pensacola Dam (in 1940) and the regulation of the body of water called the Grand Lake o’the Cherokees it created. We aim for our research to result in a multi-media website showcasing the stories people share.
As I recall Karl Raitz saying when he served as Chair of the geography department at the University of Kentucky, “more as it happens!”
