Ecologies, Forms of Creative Narrative, Journalism, Antarctic and Environmental Humanities
Discussions of ecological change are now a ubiquitous part of the pandemic - inviting thought about social and cultural life.

So let's think together about how this has implications for how we locate language with power and accuracy to describe our feelings. Shall we?

The language we use effects how we experience art, conduct research, teach, and engage as a part of civil society.

I'm interested in a vocabulary responsive to these times, where we are increasingly asked to make sense of massive events that do not scale to human minds (wild fires of the Pacific Rim; accelerated melting of gigatons of ice.) As ecologies -- both human and more than human become more dynamic, distributed, and weird, my research ponders how objects and histories create a materiality and what it means to think about the materiality of ecologies.

This thinking aspires to be deployed for social good, including explorations of the violence ecologies of war zones and phantom ecologies, such as the dead coral of the Maldivean and other reefs. Transitions related to climate change cannot be managed strictly through tech innovations -- through the work of "tech bros" designing colonies in outer space or enhancing humans with AI.

My Fulbright-sponsored research explored museums across New Zealand and how they curated objects to tell the story of Antarctica and human engagement with Antarctica. This continued my thinking as a journalist, where exploring and writing from the Antarctic had offered me peculiar and resonant experiences. Why is a 100-year-old fruitcake found in Antarctica worthy of being stared at in a museum case? What is its story? What eery tale does it bring from its icy crypt? These ideas can be shaped as public outreach and pedagogical tools to interrogate ideas of climate change. My Antarctic research was featured on New Zealand television and radio and I have given invited talks in London, Houston, Christchurch, Wellington, San Francisco, among others.

Since 2015 I have explored ideas of how we interact with local histories and ecologies, and how we form ecological communities centered on language and feelings. These explorations in both creative nonfiction and peer-reviewed journals, as well as talks, look at how narrative is instrumental in climate change transitioning towards designing a more sustainable world. My work has been informed by extensive work in the private sector, as a magazine editor, as a feature writer and as a monthly columnist for a national magazine. Broadly, my conceptual approach foregrounds how to interrogate with clarity, and at times a weird whimsy how the human lens on our place on Earth -- where we often depict rather than feel or experience the ecologies in which we live.