91TV

Administrative Email: devsgradchair@queensu.ca

Research Interests

Resource extraction; feminist political economy; settler colonialism; Indigenous resurgence; social reproduction; northern development; gender-based violence; labour.

As a feminist political economist concerned with social justice, my research examines how land and resources are accessed and organized, and how people work, care and reproduce upon these lands. My work maps the ways in which global capital draws upon gendered, racialized, and colonial structures in processes of dispossession and exploitation. At the same time, I am interested in highlighting local spaces of feminist, anti-racist and decolonizing resistance to the pressures of global capital.

Feminist Political Economy

My research, working with Indigenous communities in northern Canada, has focused on social reproduction: the daily and intergenerational work required to maintain and reproduce people, households and communities (from cooking to community education to breastfeeding to elder care). I approach social reproduction as a key site of de/colonizing struggle. To this end, I have analyzed Canadian State interventions in Indigenous social reproduction, highlighted social reproduction in Indigenous communities as a site of Indigenous resurgence; and examined shifts in social reproduction as a result of extractive projects. I have also applied social reproduction theory to analyzing gender-based violence as it operates both intimately and transnationally.

A concern with gender-based violence (GBV) weaves through all of my research. Rather than approaching GBV as an aberration from society’s norms, I am interested in examining the ways in which social and political economic structures have enabled GBV over time. I have examined feminist activism addressing GBV, State responses to GBV, and the relationship between GBV and settler colonialism.

Canadian Diamonds

My empirical focus is resource extraction, and its role in the Canadian and global political economy. My book, Refracted Economies: Diamond Mining and Social Reproduction in the North (University of Toronto Press 2022) takes a feminist political economy approach to examining the impact of the development of diamond mines in the Yellowknife region, Northwest Territories (NWT). The book examines the – often invisibilized – labour performed by Indigenous women that reproduces the northern mixed economy, looking at the ways in which this community labour has shifted as a result of the diamond mines. Refracted Economies won the 2022 International Studies Association Global Development Studies Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Donald Smiley Book Prize (Canadian Political Science Association). I discuss Refracted Economies with Vinita Srivastava and Della Green on the podcast, “Don’t Call Me Resilient” (The Conversation).

Post-Extractive Futures

My current project, Futures of Care (SSHRC Insight Grant 2022-2027) is driven by the experiences and aspirations of Indigenous and South African communities in mine-affected areas, flipping the script from communities as “impacted” to communities as “agents”. In Canada and South Africa, resource extraction is central to economic development and the political imaginary. While both countries are over-represented in global extractive industries, they are also characterized by community-based resistance to extraction and alternative relations to land and modes of resource governance, often practiced by women, Indigenous peoples and people of colour. This is a research partnership co-led with Dr. Allison Goebel, Dr. Marc Epprecht, Dedats’eetsaa: The Tłı̨chǫ Research and Training Institute, Hotii Ts’eeda (Northwest Territories, Canada), the Society, Work and Politics Institute (South Africa), and collaborating researchers and graduate students.

Supervision

I welcome students, broadly, in the areas of political economy; social reproduction; gender, race and development; decolonization and settler colonialism; and labour.

I am currently recruiting graduate students for the Futures of Care project, described above.