About me
I was raised as a settler of Ukrainian and British heritage on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and səlilwətaɬ (Tseil-Waututh) lands (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) in the 1980s and 1990s - a time of intense and ongoing colonial resource extraction, ecological destruction land-based colonial violence. Growing up in this context imbued me with a deep and lasting desire to understand the links between power, violence and ecological harm - and to work towards better relationships with land, water, their peoples, and the many worlds they nurture.
Early in my academic career, working in places shaped by conflict, colonization and international intervention offered me a deep understanding of how violence circulates through ecosystems and political structures - and the creative, generative strategies that communities use to resist it. My work also explored how nonhumans are targeted, excluded or instrumentalized in global structures of violence, working to challenge anthropocentric and humanist global ethics.
Since the mid-2010s, working as a research professor in the field of global political ecology, I’ve leading international projects, teams and networks that merge these themes. My research program has focused on on complex problems of multi-scale violence and ecological harms such as global patterns of extinction driven by colonial violence, racialized dynamics of environmental harm and oppressive futurisms rooted in racism, ableism and eugenics. Much of my recent work has focused on the interdisciplinary area of extinction studies, in particular on reframing extinction as an expression of violence.
All of my work is nourished by and indebted to ongoing collaborations with members of Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, Crip, 2SLGBTQIA+, nonhuman and other marginalized communities. It is also shaped by my lived experience as a multiply-disabled person, and the unique eco-political relations emerging from disabled life and relations.
Global political ecology
As a global political ecologist, I analyze how politics and ecosystems shape each other on multiple scales, from the cellular to the global (and beyond). My work traces how power and violence move through ecosystems, affecting radically different bodies, relationships, communities and modes of coexistence in unequal ways.
I also examine how political decisions, actions, movements and norms shape eco- systemic conditions - and vice-versa.
My work in global political ecology addresses questions such as:
How do interlocking forms of violence and oppression drive ecological disruptions such as plant and animal extinctions, climate change, or pollution?
How can we best understand and address violence that affects humans AND nonhumans, including whole ecosystems and/or earth systems?
What ideas, concepts, principles and values can nurture plurality in eco-political systems?
What practices, skills and kinds of knowledge can address complex eco-political crises?
How do globally-marginalized communities, and their diverse ways of making, sharing and practicing knowledge address eco-political crises and create conditions for thriving?
What kinds of future eco-political conditions are possible? What kinds of ethics, politics and strategies of collective survival can keep them open - including to the most vulnerable humans and nonhumans?
My way of working
I work across multiple disciplines, including international and global studies, environmental politics, political theory and philosophy, critical futures studies, critical disability studies, geography, social anthropology and the arts.
I also work amongst multiple knowledge systems, including but not limited to diverse Indigenous, Black, disabled and crip and queer traditions. My aim is to work respectfully with and between knowledge systems, affirming their plurality and distinctness, their unique and irreplaceable value, and wherever possible, contributing to their thriving and ongoing transmission. This involves co-developing practices of collaborative knowledge-making, writing, creation and knowledge-sharing with community-based collaborators. It also includes co-creating practices and protocols for place-based, art-based and land-based ethics that honour specific places, peoples and nonhuman collaborators (including land and water). Wherever possible, my projects aim to create generative opportunities for knowledge-sharing and solidarity building across communities who are resisting shared horizons of harm and violence (e.g. environmental racism and/or environmental ableism).
My approach deeply values and affirms lived experience, along with collective, oral, visual, embodied and other ways of making knowledge. This includes my own lived experience, and the collective knowledge of disabled/Crip and queer communities I belong to.
Anti-oppression
The conditions we live in - ecological, political, social, technological, economic and more - are founded on and sustained by various forms of oppression that work at multiple scales of space and time.
Thinkers, movement leaders, artists and world-makers in globally-marginalized communities have long identified global structures of power, coercion and elimination as direct threats to co-existence and thriving on earth. Currently, global structures of oppression produce harms that range from the unequal effects of climate change and pandemics to environmental policies that rely on extraction and land grabbing, to the planning of futures that involve eugenics and new forms of colonization.
For me, working in an anti-oppressive way means striving to:
recognize oppression and the many, constantly-changing forms it takes - including how different forms of oppression shape and amplify one another
foreground the dynamic relationships between power, violence and ecosystems
continually learn about and directly challenge the forms of oppression in which I am complicit and from which I benefit, and those which negatively affect me and the communities I am part of
contribute to building solidarity across groups experiencing (multiple forms of) oppression,
co-create other social, political and ecological arrangements, ways of connecting, and future conditions rooted in principles of co-existence and respect for difference.
The CRAACHE+ framework:
For analyzing diverse contexts of eco-political crises, harms, and violence, I developed the acronym CRAACHE+. It stands for:
Colonialism
Racism
Ableism
Anthropocentrism
Capitalism
Heteropatriarchy
Eugenics
+ (emerging and other forms of oppression)
Instead of analyzing one, two or three of these elements at a time, the CRAACHE+ framework helps me to hold in focus the many interlocking logics of oppression that converge in each situation of eco-political crisis, violence and/or harm. The ‘+’ holds open the possibility of other and/or emerging forms of oppression.
The acronym ‘CRAACHE+’ (pronounced ‘crash-plus’ in English) echoes the forms of collapse caused by these interlocking forms of oppression. However, the order of the letters does not suggest that any of them is more important than any other, and their sequence can change to better reflect each context where they converge. If you’d like to know more about how I approach this framework, it’s discussed in the article “Generative Decay: towards a Politics of and for Earth” in International Relations.