This site details my long term research with herbalists, and may also include short pieces by my Research Assistants and others. You’ll soon find explorations of various lengths and styles on plants, people, power, and the planet.

My current book project, Poison, Power, and Possibility: Building Relations with Medicinal Plants draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork with herbalists to explore histories of colonization and the racialized segregation of medical knowledge about plant medicines.

The book contributes to ongoing conversations in medical and environmental humanities. I am concerned with the politics and histories of medical knowledge and practice pertaining to bodies, plants, chemicals, environments, health, and illness, and what it takes for humans and a living earth to flourish. The key question my book asks is: What does it take to create remedies for the things that ail us?

For more depth on the book, click here.

How did this project come to be, logistically? Key supports have been many!

Ethnographic work has been supported financially by Cornell University’s Anthropology Department, Institute for Social Sciences, and Society for Humanities, as well as by Dartmouth College’s Anthropology Department and The Ethics Institute at Dartmouth. I also worked for wages during my primary fieldwork, as an educator at some points and as a grocery store clerk at others.

Research for this book has also included extensive archival work in multiple collections of medical and ethnobotanical records, which has been supported by fellowships from the Consortium on the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Clendening Historical Medical Library of the University of Kansas Medical Center, and the F.C. Wood Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

And I would be nowhere without colleagues, friends, and research assistants. My interlocutors and colleagues at The Center for Studying Herbalism (pseudonym) and in its web offered a ground on which to stand to examine herbalism – through my own learning and through more classic ethnographic approaches. My interlocutors and colleagues at Lo Semillere in Boriken (puerto rico) have added recent invaluable depth to my understanding of healing justice as a conceptual frame, and how it is mobilized with/because of plant medicines.

RAs Sia Meni, Sumreet Sandhu, Namitha Alluri, and Justin Herrera have worked diligently to support my work in 2023-2024. Beth Reddy, Jane Henderson, Sarah Kelly, Laura Ogden, Montserrat Perez Castro-Perez, Alexandria Casteel, Mayra Munoz, Maron Greenleaf, and Amanda Witzel have been excellent recent interlocutors, along with anonymous reviewers at Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Finishing my dissertation would not have happened without my writing group – and I mention this because, though the book is not the dissertation, they are intimately related – Anaar Desai-Stephens, Beth Reddy, Ashley Smith, Hayden Kantor, Eleanor Andrews, and others who moved in and out of that space.