RESEARCH
People’s blockades against the ‘Automated Air War’
2024︎︎︎present

My current research focuses on the 1972 People’s Blockade of Arms to Indochina, a national campaign of civilian-led occupations of domestic naval ports, munitions plants, and military rail lines protesting the United States’ air wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

If you were involved in a blockade and are interested in telling me about your experiences, or if you were active military on a ship, train, or other site that was blockaded by civilians around 1971-2, please email me here.






Unless otherwise noted, all above images are sourced from the 1972 document “Why the People’s Blockade?” published by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

RESEARCH
Our toxic creek
2023︎︎︎present

Following my review of Newtown Odyssey: An open-air opera for, about, and on a creek for the New York Review of Architecture, I conducted interviews with the opera’s composer and librettist. Those interviews informed my article “Citizen Scientist 1 Returns,” which looks at one of the opera’s characters, an unnamed citizen scientist studying the remediation of the most polluted waterway in North America, as a paranoid figure of settler colonization. Fforthcoming Spring 2027 in LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture.

RESEARCH
“Anti-Assimilationist Landscape”
2017︎︎︎2023

An essay on the queer spatial practices of Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry.

Through a study of two series of landscape photographs by twenty-first century American artists, I proposes a theory of “anti-assimilationist landscape”: a politicized rejection of the conventions of landscape imagery and the repressive systems of land ownership, gender, and nation-building it sustains. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in sites with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. The essay argues that their works function as both interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a political ecology of difference that invites a politics beyond the liberal-democratic notion of citizenship and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil.’ Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, I contrast this anti-assimilationist mode to the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation,’ proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.

You can read the article in Journal of Landscape Architecture: “Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.”



All Collier Schorr images were reproduced courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York.
All David Benjamin Sherry images were reproduced courtesy of Morán Morán.

TEACHING
MICA AH-379 Contemporary Architecture Criticism and Theory
2022

In Spring 2022, I designed and taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on contemporary architectural theory. 379-AH Contemporary Architecture Criticism & Theory at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). You can access the full syllabus here.

RESEARCH
“After the Hyper-professional”
2020

A provocation co-authored with Julie Shapiro as Bad Little Brother.  You can read the full text here.

We propose a shift to the mutual aid organized by workers in other professionalized spheres to share their knowledge and labor in non-hierarchical, non-exploitative ways (eg: Tilted Scales Collective, street medics).¹ We call for a deprofessionalized theory and practice that embraces community care as a tenet of spatial design, instead of one that views community input as a sometimes-important but always external influence on the work of specialists. We call for reflections on the problems of professional status as well as the opportunities that its structures (eg: licensure) afford to design workers at its margins. We call for case studies in the alternative organization of resources and space that makes mutual aid possible. We call for explorations of mutual aid and direct action as aesthetic and affective practices, “simultaneously profoundly foolish and utterly serious.”²

(1) see Dean Spade. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Verso, 2020. See also Julia Nakad. “Care for Where There Is No Justice: The modern history of street medics and how they support social movements,” Hesperian Health Guides, 6 Jan. 2016.

(2) David Graeber. Direct Action: an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009.