Research & Projects
Research & Projects
Embedded Files
My research examines how political concepts shape the institutions, forms of authority, and modes of collective action that govern contemporary social and ecological life. My published work spans environmental politics, political economy, and political theory. My current research investigates how ‘the political’ is conceptualized and the implications this has for democratic action and social transformation. I ground these conceptual and methodological contributions in empirical case studies involving technocratic political movements and green extractivism, particularly as they appear in Canadian contexts.
Approach:
Approach:
Methodologically, my approach combines philosophical archaeology and critical phenomenology. The former reconstructs the historical emergence of political concepts, while the latter examines how these concepts become embedded in everyday practices, institutions, and forms of subjectivity. Together, these approaches allow me to analyze power as simultaneously conceptual, institutional, and embodied. My work is grounded in the premise that political theory and ontology are mutually constitutive. Ontological claims about what exists and how it exists are never politically neutral; they emerge within particular historical and political contexts and, in turn, shape how political actors, institutions, and possibilities for action are understood. My research therefore moves between analyses of explicit ontological theories and the implicit ontological assumptions embedded within political concepts and institutions.
Published Work
Published Work
This paper provides a novel exploration of extreme global poverty using an original framework that combines critiques of cruelty with the (emerging) concept of necro-economics. The paper argues that the global economic system requires suffering from those at the margins while simultaneously cultivating a callous indifference amongst those at the centre by substituting technical for moral responsibility.
Taking a degrowth perspective, this paper uses a supply chain analysis to de-fetishize the wind turbine as a source of immaterial clean energy. It argues that technological improvements, including wind power, must be complimented by policy that reduces economic impact overall.
How can a municipality go circular? This project explores 13 case studies in circular district innovation to understand patterns in creation and operation. Project findings identify key actors, policy frameworks, governance structures, and funding sources characteristic of successful projects.
Forthcoming
Forthcoming
Kawana’bi’kag and its production as a site available to governmental and extractive logics, more commonly referred to as the Ring of Fire (RoF), is paradigmatic of processes related to what Thea Riofrancos (2023) refers to as the security-sustainability nexus. I argue that the push by federal and provincial governments to access and develop Kawana’bi’kag continues Canada’s long legacy of colonial violence and extraction. The ‘ring of fire’ demonstrates an evolving geopolitical strategy and involving security and the expansion of colonial power. I provide a brief history of the region since early prospecting began in 2002 and theorize the context of green extractivism and colonial dispossession in Canada, followed by a concise overview of what Post and Le Billon (2025) refer to as the ‘green war’ and its relation to Riofranco’s sustainability-security nexus. I conclude by discussing Ontario’s Bill-5 and the Federal government’s Bill-C5.
Green Extractivism
Green Extractivism
Degrowth and Motion
Degrowth and Motion
My doctoral research, Degrowth as Kino-politics: a political archaeology of motion, argued that growth is irreducible to an economic phenomenon. Instead, growth is primarily a kinetic phenomenon related to expansion and momentum. The project looked at historical regimes of expansionary politics and the specific policies, institutions, and actors that maintain those regimes. I concluded the project with several case studies exploring non-expansionary (i.e., degrowth) democratic modes of politics.
This article explores the intersections of degrowth and biopolitical analyses, highlighting a significant gap in the current degrowth discourse and offering a novel perspective on the socio-political implications of growth. Drawing on Foucault's conception of biopower, the paper explores how growth functions as a biopolitical mechanism that shapes contemporary socio-political landscapes. It argues that growth manifests not merely as economic progress but as a dynamic force that organizes and intensifies life and death across global economies. Synthesizing the work of Foucault, Arendt, and Agamben, the study illuminates how biopolitics operates within the degrowth paradigm, revealing the governance of life and death through mechanisms that perpetuate both vitality and vulnerability. By reframing biopolitical theory in the context of degrowth, this research contributes to a nuanced understanding of how growth-centric ideologies influence the distribution of life and death in contemporary societies.
Degrowth and Biopower
Degrowth and Biopower
Future Research
Future Research
My future research can be split into three nested clusters: Green Extractivisms in settler-colonial contexts (grounded empirical research), post-structural theories of the state (conceptual framing), and political ontology (methodological). These projects will generate a series of journal articles in environmental political theory, political ontology, and critical state theory, while the state project forms the basis of a monograph.
Green Extraction
Green Extraction
Green extractivism(s) refer to large scale renewable energy projects that require, expand, legitimise, and replicate extractive modes of production, but linked to and justified by promises of green capitalism. My current research examines how contemporary green-transition policies invoke discourses of national security and economic competitiveness to circumvent constitutional obligations toward Indigenous consultation and consent.
The State and Technics
The State and Technics
This project delves into the particular ontology of the state as a technical entity by examining how appeals to technical expertise increasingly serve as sources of political legitimacy in contemporary governance, from technocratic administration to emerging forms of algorithmic governance. I wililcomplete this project as a book-length manuscript tracing the conceptual history of order and technics, beginning with classical philosophy’s ambivalent figure of the kybernetes (cybernetician) as the statesman who steers the polis, and ending with contemporary technocracy movements.
Critical Political ontology
Critical Political ontology
Political ontology concerns the discursive construction of politics. A critical approach to this subject requires attending to the ways the political is constructed throughout the history of political thought. This research examines how political thinkers define the boundaries of the political itself, identifying the assumptions that determine which actors, practices, and forms of life are recognized as political and which are excluded from political consideration.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse