About

I am an interpretive political scientist and interdisciplinary political theorist of race, gender, and sexuality politics and political thought. My work centers activists as political theorists and draws connections between theoretical and historical-empirical research on political change, discourse, and the formation of political community.

My first book, If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals (Oxford University Press, 2023), is about the we of politics—how that we is made, fought over, and remade—and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Drawing on the political provocations of James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists, the book traces a distinct lineage of identificatory appeals from within race and gender justice movements that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom.

New projects focus on Lorraine Hansberry’s political imagination; histories of queer and feminist monitoring of the Far Right; and June Jordan's question of how more livable, beautiful worlds are wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live. I am also co-editing, with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, LaShonda Carter, Nikol Alexander-Floyd, and Jessica Millward, a volume of intellectual biographies of contemporary Black Women’s Studies scholars of politics. 

My thinking is shaped by community work and by scholarship across fields including political science/political theory, Black studies, ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, cultural studies, Latinx studies, indigenous studies, history, and studies of social movements. 

Before coming to Western Washington University, I was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Riverside; a Wayne Morse Dissertation Fellow at the University of Oregon; and a community organizer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area.