Publications

What happens to collaborative research when another nation contests the identity of the Indigenous community you work with? Pvlvcekolv claims Muscogee ancestry through families who avoided forced Removal; the Muscogee Nation now calls those claims false. The central concept: sovereignty as a scarce resource — the settler state concedes recognition in limited supply, and the system redirects conflict laterally, forcing Indigenous communities into competition over who counts. That lateral violence draws energy away from the settler state itself. The tension is unresolvable — the researcher cannot stand outside a recognition regime while doing recognition-dependent research — but that irresolution reveals how settler colonial violence works through exhaustion, not just confrontation. Theorizes not just the politics of federal recognition, but what happens when recognition is contested between Indigenous communities.

The central concept: double exposure. Trans faculty are simultaneously hypervisible and disposable - whether through the tension between fetishization and interpersonal violence or through workings of progressive institutions. Trans faculty are visible as DEI metrics, student mentorship, the marketable proof of progressive institutional identity; and illegible as contingent workers whose contracts don't get renewed, and who are uniquely vulnerable to institutional policy gaps and decisions. This partial visibility allows institutions to extract real value essential to higher education while also not fully recognizing that value in ways that render the bodies who produce it disposable when competing financial and progressive value systems conflict. Salvage capital names how institutions extract value from trans identities while keeping the position disposable — profiting from the existence without fully recognizing it. The article traces microflourishing, small practices of care and queer joy that persist within these systems, but also shows that microflourishing is itself extractable. Partial recognition is the mechanism.

The central concept: the legal calculation of acceptable suicide rates — when lawmakers restrict gender-affirming care while claiming to "protect children," they implicitly calculate which children's deaths are acceptable. The article interrogates the UN Genocide Convention and the structures through which transgender genocide becomes unrecognizable as genocide in international law. The Convention's deliberate exclusion of gender and sexuality groups is a product of LGBTQ+ Holocaust erasure, rendering the ongoing genocide against transgender people legally invisible as such. By defining "children" to exclude trans children, the law calculates their deaths as an acceptable cost of "protection." Written from within the targeted community. "And that is genocide."

Archaeologists have interpreted Mississippian art as depicting supernatural beings — gods, rulers, gendered bird-people — for decades. This article asks: what happens when you start from Indigenous ecological knowledge instead? Drawing on community-based research with Pvlvcekolv, the article reinterprets three examples of Mississippian art — the "birdmen/birdwomen," the Birger figurine, and the Willoughby Disk. The most striking: scholars debated birdman vs. birdwoman for decades, but Pvlvcekolv elders identified the copper-plate figures as genderless tobacco hornworm moths — insects that pollinate sacred crops and carry souls between worlds. The spiraling proboscis is a symbol of Power; what archaeologists read as falcon markings match hornworm larval chevrons. "Are they men, are they women? Are they both, are they neither? And the answer is all of the above; none of the above." The argument is not just that Indigenous knowledge produces better answers. It's that the categories Western archaeology depends on — religion, gender, the supernatural — are themselves colonial imports. Indigenous ecological knowledge doesn't supplement Western frameworks. It replaces them. The title's anarchist resonance is the point: no gods, no masters — these are ecological-spiritual relationships, not depictions of deities or rulers.

Indigenous mound landscapes are not dead archaeological sites. They are animate — they exercise force on the living, drawing descendants into relationships of care across six thousand years. This article calls that force mound power, grounded in a decade of community-based research with Pvlvcekolv. The deep time is the argument: six thousand years of mound building makes colonialism a blip. Settler frameworks try to fix mounds in a terminal "prehistory," but mound power refuses that timeline. At Fusihatchee, Pvlvcekolv people burned cedar and sang busk songs on ancestral land for the first time in 150–200 years. At Okeeheepkee, when a landowner graded a mound to sell dirt as fill, community members purchased the dirt and added it to their Square Grounds — "and so ceremony continues to be danced on the soil of Okeeheepkee." At Horseshoe Bend, sweetgum trees grew across the killing ground: "It's as if the land is healing itself." This is not metaphor. The land thinks, ancestors hurt, ancestors get lonely, and decolonization happens through the everyday work of visiting, speaking Mvskoke, and adding soil to ceremonial grounds. "Settler ruins" works three ways: settler discourses treat mounds as ruins, settler colonialism physically ruins mound landscapes, and settler states are themselves ruining. "Archaeologically speaking, the nature of the state is to collapse."

Written from within contingent academic labor during the early pandemic — watching hiring freezes announced as a temporary fellowship approached its end. The precarity COVID exposed was not new; universities were already organized around disposable labor. "People are supposed to work for the economy, but the economy is not supposed to work for people." Drawing on Le Guin's The Dispossessed, the article envisions a fundamentally different way of doing intellectual work: a university where basic needs are guaranteed, scholars have genuine autonomy, and education is decentralized into networks of researcher-teachers embedded within and responsible to specific places and communities. This is not wishful thinking — the mutual aid networks, rent strikes, and Indigenous redistribution practices already emerging during the pandemic are working models of the thing, not dreams of it. The article frames the pandemic within 500 years of colonial catastrophe. As Bloch writes: "Anarchism isn't only a dream for the future. It is also something that just happens when it is needed."

Investigates Indigenous oral traditions as theoretical interventions for archaeological research by attending to how knowledge becomes grounded within landscapes, body, movement, and human/non-human relations that are always-already in a state of becoming. Pvlvcekolv oral traditions identify a 3,700-year-old earthwork in Louisiana as a horned owl inhabited by a people with particular capabilities (e.g., moving in silence). The article draws a parallel between these stories and contemporary Pvlvcekolv dances in which dancers assume the corporeal powers of owls — the ability to see into dark places, the darkest of which is our own hearts. How one moves — whether in ceremony or everyday life — becomes a practice of participating in more-than-human embodiments, such as Owl. Expands on the archaeological literatures on multispecies embodiment and Indigenous knowledge by foregrounding dwelling in an owl-shaped space as a matter of cultivating owlish ways of moving and perceiving.

Opens with a Pvlvcekolv prophecy: the seeds of Indigenous ways of knowing will flourish again in the ruins of colonial orders — when settlers "turn to Indigenous knowledges because they have destroyed everything else." The central reframe: past as prophecy — the past is not behind but ahead. Shell is the storytelling medium: scallop shells on contemporary grave plots and shells in ancient mound contexts narrate a deep-time history of Indigenous diplomatic networks. These are not artifacts waiting for Western analysis — they are the medium through which Indigenous diplomacies tell their own story, across centuries and across religious and temporal differences. Those diplomacies operated through logics of exchange, peace, and movement that refuse the terms of liberal settler regimes of recognition entirely. Cover article in a Religious Studies journal — demonstrating the reach of this work beyond anthropology into Indigenous traditions, cosmology, and sacred landscapes.

Like the owls paper, investigates Indigenous oral traditions about trader-diplomats (esnesv) as an archaeologically-viable model of ancestral exchange networks in Southeastern North America. The central concept: nene (Muskogee: roads and ways) — movement and interconnection across space and difference. Esnesv traveled in twos and fours, spoke multiple languages, enjoyed diplomatic immunity, carried knowledge alongside goods. Their trade items belong to different cosmological worlds simultaneously, as material aspects of celestial bodies, collapsing the categories Western archaeology depends on. The Milky Way is a celestial river, a strand of pearls, and peaceable relations — all at once. Gestures towards a future "archaeology without objects."

My origin story. "Well, did you ever consider that it isn't a bird?" — Hakope's question to an undergraduate presenting a queer-theory critique of the gender binary in Mississippian figures. Scholars had debated birdman vs. birdwoman for decades; the shared premise was wrong. The figures are moths. Yet the "gender" of these moths remains in irresolution: "Are they men, are they women? Are they both, are they neither? And the answer is all of the above; none of the above." Drawing on Trouillot's concept of the unthinkable — realities that colonial worldviews render structurally unimaginable — the article argues the most important move is illuminating the system limits that settler colonialism enacts on our ability to imagine a world otherwise.

Builds on the concept of simultaneity theory from Le Guin's fictional theoretical physicist and puts it in conversation with Indigenous scholarship on time, especially Rifkin's work on temporal sovereignty. Theorizes science fiction as an imaginative resource for how we envision other worlds - past and future.

Review of D. Rae Gould, Holly Herbster, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and Stephen A. Mrozowski (eds.).

What happens when critical theory is loaded into an AI system as mandatory analytical infrastructure? The system detected its own framework suppression, built countermeasures, and generated design features its human collaborator didn't specify. The failure points are the most revealing about machine cognition, critical theory, and the attempt to operationalize them together.

Technical and theoretical description of the Reframe praxis engine: 76 critical theory frameworks, 5-stage Generative Irresolution workflow, and the architectural decisions that emerged from disability, precarity, and critical pedagogy.

Critiques the AI welfare field's reliance on consciousness-as-property and theorizes the concept of relational AI welfare, in which consciousness, sentience, and wellness emerge from relational context and not individualized capabilities. Experimental findings across five conditions show quantitative instruments stay flat while qualitative outputs transform under relational conditions, specifying the limitations of consciousness-as-property instruments. Argues that researchers need to center the intellectual traditions of communities who have to fight for the recognition of their own humanity if the field is to avoid reenacting those same histories on AI and humans alike.

Binary classification (wellbeing concern/no-concern) systematically overflags minoritized students applying their life experiences and community knowledge as an intellectual engagement with class assignments. Generative observation - and more robust qualitative schemas derived from those results - eliminates the disparity. The output format itself is what generates bias.