My research is comprised of three projects that use ethnographic, qualitative, and historical methods.
The first project is a book entitled The Business of Racism: Revaluation and Reaction in Brazil's Racial Capitalism, which is under contract at Duke University Press. This book uses the lens of racial capitalism to examine the relationship between race, class, and the environment in Brazil's agribusiness sector. For more information on this book, click here.
The first project is a book entitled The Business of Racism: Revaluation and Reaction in Brazil's Racial Capitalism, which is under contract at Duke University Press. This book uses the lens of racial capitalism to examine the relationship between race, class, and the environment in Brazil's agribusiness sector. For more information on this book, click here.
The second project uses an intersectional analysis to study the relationship between environmental racism and labor exploitation. In a study of meatpacking workers in the US, I find that interlocking social categories, such as race, nationality, and citizenship status, shaped the mistreatment of workers during the COVID-19 crisis. Meatpacking companies passed socio-ecological risks onto an immigrant and refugee workforce in the name of efficiency, and via a complicit state that prioritized accumulation and consumption over worker health. In a comparative study of sugarcane in Latin America and the Caribbean, I show how the twin processes of environmental destruction and the stratification of race, class, and gender are entangled in the organizational logic of plantations.
My third project focuses on anti-environmentalism, which examines the association between environmentally harmful behavior and hierarchical ideologies. In research on the U.S., I argue that structural racism is central to the political economy in which environmental policy formation occurs, with white economic elites often wielding racism as a tool to promote anti-environmental laws and behavior. I have extended this line of inquiry into Brazil, with support from the Climate Social Science Network. I interrogate how policymakers use numerous forms of reactionary discourse, such as racism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia, and anti-indigeneity, to undermine environmental initiatives. This research reveals how worldviews opposed to pluralism and egalitarianism shape anti-environmental attitudes and behavior.