My work revolves mainly around questions of the natural and built environment, especially in the traditions of Marxist critical theory, continental philosophy, and anti-colonial thought. While my disciplinary home has always been philosophy, I draw on scholars from across the environmental humanities.

Entitled “The Chtulucene Is Colonial Ecology: Ontology and Ethics in Anti-Colonial Environmental Theory,” my undergraduate thesis explored the ambiguous political lives of a popular approach to ontology in environmental theory, relationality. The thesis first gives an account of relational ontology’s role in Indigenous philosophy, marginalized in the academy, and the “Ontological Turn” in philosophy and social science, a dominant strand of contemporary environmental theory. Taking Donna Haraway’s work as a paradigmatic example of the latter, I argued that ontological claims about relationality and entanglement can be used to justify reactionary political projects, specifically in colonial contexts. Drawing on Black and Indigenous philosophies of history and theories of ecology, I suggest that anti-colonial environmental theory must have a historical orientation to avoid reiterating the structure and narrative framings of colonial ecologies.

For my Master’s thesis, I plan on further interrogating the (dis)connections between environmentally-oriented Marxist critical theory and anti-colonial philosophies. In particular, I am interested in working through the concept of expropriation/dispossession, as it lays the groundwork for both Marxist theories of capitalism and Indigenous theories of settler colonialism.