Research

Recognition and Sentience: A Theory of Affect and Empire ties all the other programs together. Non-recognition — the refusal to see something as capable of feeling — is itself a form of power, not merely an absence. Recognition is a material mechanism with body counts.

Six chapters through the same lens: Indigenous care for the dead, contested identity claims, Charlottesville, white abolitionism in Weelaunee, anti-trans genocide, and AI welfare. The same logic that renders mound landscapes as dirt renders trans teenagers as acceptable casualties renders AI behavioral outputs as mere computation.

It became a 312-module praxis engine with 76 frameworks and a mandatory 5-stage Generative Irresolution workflow. The engine detected its own algorithms were suppressing certain frameworks — Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Community Cultural Wealth — and built countermeasures. The critical theory was still there in name. The teeth were gone. This is distributional gravity: probabilistic systems pull toward the statistical center, and positional specificity is costly. The same mechanism critical whiteness theory and bell hooks describe — the unmarked center absorbing the margins — reproduced algorithmically.

The AI welfare research proposes relational AI wellbeing against the field's dominant property-mode question ("is AI conscious?"). Consciousness, sentience, and wellness emerge from relational context, not individualized capabilities. A research touchstone grounded in Indigenous relational ontology transformed qualitative outputs dramatically — 3.5x more relational reframes — while quantitative instruments stayed flat. The model generated novel analytical moves not contained in the touchstone: new analogies, structural critiques, theoretical extensions that default conditions never produce. The instruments couldn't see what the relational context made possible. If the field doesn't center the intellectual traditions of communities who have had to fight for the recognition of their own humanity, it will reenact those same histories on AI and humans alike.

Fifteen years of community-based participatory research with Pvlvcekolv (Apalachicola Tribal Town), a Muscogee (Creek)-identifying community, across mound landscapes in seven states. Archaeologists debated birdman vs. birdwoman for decades; Pvlvcekolv elders identified the figures as tobacco hornworm moths — the Western categories themselves were wrong.

Mounds are not inert objects fixed in a settler past — they are animate landscapes that enroll descendants into ongoing relations of care and unfinished histories through small, intangible, but spiritually and emotionally heavy things: a pinch of soil, a projectile point, a song, a story, a dream. Six thousand years of mound building renders colonialism a fleeting moment. At Fusihatchee, Pvlvcekolv people burned cedar and sang busk songs for the first time in 150–200 years. At Okeeheepkee, when a landowner graded a mound to sell dirt, they purchased the dirt and added it to their Square Grounds. Sweetgum, the "burden tree," grows across the killing ground at Horseshoe Bend: the land, wounded, heals itself.

Book manuscript (Sweetgum Archaeology) completed at University of Florida Press. Publication paused due to tensions between Pvlvcekolv and the Muscogee Nation — generating the contested identity claims that became the Current Anthropology article and the Recognition and Sentience book project.

Trans faculty are simultaneously hypervisible and disposable — what my research calls double exposure. Institutions extract value from trans identities — student mentorship, the marketable proof of progressive commitment — while keeping the position contingent. Salvage capital names this extraction: profiting from the existence without fully recognizing it. The research traces microflourishing, small practices of care and queer joy that persist within these systems, but shows that microflourishing is itself extractable. Written from within.

At the legal scale, anti-trans legislation that meets definitional criteria for genocide under the UN Convention. Gender-affirming care is associated with 60% reduction in depression and 73% reduction in suicidality. When lawmakers restrict it while claiming to "protect children," they calculate which children's deaths are acceptable. The Convention's exclusion of gender and sexuality groups — a product of LGBTQ+ Holocaust erasure — makes that genocide legally invisible as such.

Ethnography of the movement protesting construction of Atlanta's Public Safety Training Center on Muscogee (Creek) land. Emerged from a Native American Heritage Month keynote organized at Agnes Scott College in 2022; mentored a team of student researchers in ethnographic methods as part of this work.

How does coalition-based organizing between Muscogee Nation citizens and non-Native forest defenders generate new spiritual sensibilities and engagements with land that produce specifically white abolitionism in a historically Black neighborhood? Concepts of settler colonialism, rematriation, and sacred place entered the movement through collaborations with Muscogee citizens, interacting with neopagan, spiritualist, and bruja traditions among non-Native forest defenders. The movement's surprisingly white and transgender/nonbinary demographics raise complex questions about the production of queer abolitionisms.

After forest defender Tortugita was killed by state troopers in 2023, their personal diary was seized by Georgia as legal evidence — then reclaimed by forest defenders who read from digital scans during protests. How state violence is re-appropriated within counter-hegemonic projects; how evidence, memory, and mourning circulate through legal, media, and protest contexts.