Research

My dissertation research examines memory institutions and data preservation in the Arctic, primarily focusing on the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard. I'm interested in the way sites such as this relate to and imagine both their local environment and the global climate. Past work has looked at 'glacier funerals' and other commemorative acts which imagine ice as a subject and mediator of feelings of loss, mourning, and remembrance.

Cold media, Arctic environments, and archival imaginaries

The multiple deaths of glaciers: Climatic, categorical, metaphoric

In my master's thesis, I studied the way several different kinds of mobilities were framed through metaphors in geographic scholarship. Rather than an innocent form of figurative language, metaphors are active shapers of society and space. In various ways, my work continues to trace the politics of representations—both textual and cartographic—and the worlds they imperfectly create.

Tapestry and tomb, choreography and clot: Metaphors for mobilities and moorings in geographical literature

Critical geographies of representations

Several of my recent publications and presentations explore the consequences of the 'view from above' and the technologies which afford such perspectives, from Google Earth to Starlink satellites and their physical and visual occupation of orbital space. A related interest is in 'planet walks' and the way they communicate a sense of scale.

Google gazes and digital seams: Visual epistemologies between satellite view and Street View

Street in globe, globe in street: Google Earth, planet walks, and peripatetic mediations of scale

Holding up the skies: Is Starlink occupying low Earth orbit?