Research

I study how people make and claim knowledge about nature, place, culture, and technologies.

FDN

Thus far, I have explored how digital technologies co-produce techno-scientific ideas about nature and transform places from conservation sites to college campuses to dairy farms. I also completed a collaborative project with Emma Tait on the production of digital outer space natures in the game, No Man’s Sky. My current work examines arid spaces in digital games and ways of combining STS and digital game studies in teaching about making toxic spaces safer.

Contested Expertise and Subjectivities in the Woodlands of Zambézia, Mozambique

This work details how local woodland residents and others attempt to bridge radically different views of nature and to position themselves as leaders, heroes, patrons and experts. I highlight the banal, embodied practices of daily sweeping, policing resource and land use, distributing fruit tree resources, meals and ‘orphan kits’. I trace environmental assertions and rumors in their transformation of miombo woodland landscapes.