About

I am a political scientist and educator. I received my PhD from Purdue University, and since then have taught at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels, in traditional, interdisciplinary, and ESL programs, and in face-to-face and online formats at many different kinds of educational institutions. As a result, I’ve taught a broad array of subjects, including political theory, international relations, the political economy of development, political ecology, the politics of gender, U.S. politics, family policy, technological ethics, research and writing methods, and many others.

My current research primarily focuses on prison and police abolitionism, and the design of strategies, ethical schemas, and forms of social organization that can, in the words of Angela Davis, render carceral systems “obsolete”. I am especially interested in the frameworks of abolitionist teaching and abolitionist social work as vehicles for advancing the abolitionist project.

I also research how different ways of organizing and perceiving time can structure, segregate, stratify, disrupt, and transform the sociopolitical systems that govern our lives, as well as our understanding of them. Our experiences with time are deeply political, even if we don’t often explicitly consider them as such: mobilizing memories of trauma or triumph to give meaning to personal events, collective memory, or state policy; fearing or exalting continuity of the past, or the emergence of something new; dreaming of alternative futures; interpreting the world in terms of future progress, endless repetition, decline, or deferred salvation; finding purpose and expectations of security in a world where neither are guaranteed. These structures we give to temporality are the scaffolding for empires and revolutions alike, as well as shelters (however limited) against the precarity of our lives.