About

A longer note on who I am and what I'm working on.

I'm a PhD student in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Dr. Jennifer Clapp. My work sits between food-systems scholarship, political economy, and discard studies. I read fairly broadly across traditions — political ecology, critical sustainability, feminist political economy, science and technology studies, discard studies, and the epistemological and ontological turns in social theory — and part of my current doctoral work is figuring out where my own dissertation lives in relation to all of that.

Three overlapping areas currently organize my research: food waste, discard studies, and the politics of knowledge; power, corporate concentration, and governance in the global food economy; and transformation, theories of change, and the knowledge-to-action gap. These aren't a thesis — they're the territory I'm working in while the dissertation scope sharpens.

Before Waterloo, I completed a Master of Science at the University of Victoria (2024), with a thesis on sustainable packaging and consumer environmentalism, and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at UVic (2020), with an honours thesis on the archaeology of improperly-discarded cigarette butts. I've worked as a research assistant for IPES-Food under Jennifer Clapp, as a sustainability analyst at The Delphi Group in Ottawa, and as a field technician and camp cook with the Tseshaht First Nation and the UVic Historical Ecology and Coastal Archaeology program in the Broken Group Islands.

Alongside my academic work, I teach wilderness first aid and canoe instruction through Ridge Wilderness, and I volunteer with Embark Sustainability Society at SFU distributing rescued food. Over the last decade I've cooked professionally, worked in grocery retail, rescued food, dumpster-dived, and done a fair amount of food-waste activism — none of which is incidental to my research. It's the ground on which the questions I ask actually make sense to me.

I am also, for what it's worth, a bit neurotic about food waste personally — I eat my banana peels and coffee grounds. In my spare time I'm an avid writer, a mediocre musician, and a committed user of the Oxford comma.

Positionality

A note on positionality

I am a settler of European descent, living and working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. My academic home at Waterloo sits on the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples, on land covered by the Haldimand Tract. The food-system questions I study — dispossession, concentration, the conditions under which food is discarded and by whom — cannot be separated from settler colonialism and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land, food, and governance. I am trying to work in a way that keeps that connection through the framings I use, the sources I cite, and the questions I ask. I'm still learning how to do that well.