My work focuses on the intersections of cultural and environmental politics, examining relationships between the politics of nature and forms of social difference, such as racial identities, class interests and national imaginaries.  Building on scholarship in anthropology, geography and science studies, I explore how entanglements of nature and difference are central to not only environmental politics, but also to the formations of racialized subjects, their intimate desires and modern regimes of rule. Using in-depth ethnography and detailed historical research, I examine how ideologies of nature have operated in political spaces as seemingly disparate as the eugenics movement of the mid-20th century, migrating swarms of bees, and contemporary forest politics in New Mexico. By tracking formations of nature between such spaces, I aim to underscore the complex connections between environmental and social politics as they are made and manifest in people's daily lives - whether in landscapes, bodies, or genes.

My new research builds on my past work on nature, politics and difference, using conceptual insights from anthropology, science studies and theories of history to develop new approaches to natural history as both an object of critical inquiry and a conceptual tool. Through fine-grained, multi-sited ethnography and detailed archival research, this project examines manifestations of natural history not as historical artifacts or elements of an outmoded system of knowledge production, but rather in the present, exploring contemporary taxonomies and varieties of nature, charting their resonances and discords with fossilized formations of prior natures. By juxtaposing naturalizing discourses of human history with historicizing discourses of the natural world and exploring the intimate relationship between the making of modern individuals and the remaking of modern natures, I hope to illuminate the powerful role that the materials, ideas and practices of nature play in the making of modern subjects and in assertions of modern forms of authority. In so doing, I hope to recuperate the seemingly archaic concept of natural history as a means of critically rewriting contemporary politics of nature and difference.

One chapter, for example, explores the natural history of swarms, tracing the traffic between bees and human collectivities. For this chapter, I draw on my ethnographic work with nomadic industrial beekeepers in the U.S. west, examining how the political economy of beekeeping has transformed the form and meanings of the contemporary hive. Through archival research and interviews, I investigate how explanations of human collective behavior in, for example, lynching bees, anarchist utopias, and the "War on Terror," draw on understandings of the social behavior of bees to make intelligible and legitimize collective human behaviors. In another chapter, I explore the legal case of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, ex-founder of the Crips gang in L.A., and his death by lethal injection. Through review of legal documents and interviews at San Quentin State Prison, where I also taught classes, I demonstrate that the case deliberation revolved around the characterization of Williams' "wild and uncontrollable nature" and the possibility or impossibility of his redemption from his 'inherent violent nature.' Embedded in the legal arguments, ideas of criminal justice reform, and Williams' own struggles with redemption are concepts and metaphors drawn from theories of natural history, weaving 18th- and 19th-century concepts of nature into contemporary bio-political discourses of law, race and justice. Another chapter investigates the natural history of nanotechnology, tracing the history and politics of scale from scala naturae, one of the oldest hierarchical ordering of natures, to Linnaeus' 18th century taxonomic nomenclature, to contemporary political and cultural implications of scientific quests to reorder modern nature at the nanoscale. Through these and other inquiries into varied realms of science, I hope this new book project will demonstrate how natural history serves as archive and archetype for the formation and reproduction not only of social taxonomies and hierarchies but also concomitant political erasures and openings.