I am an anthropologist and Professor in the Departments of Archaeology, Geography, and Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. My research investigates how different worlds sustain themselves and encounter one another amid the environmental, geopolitical, and existential challenges that mark the ongoing crumbling of the one-world world of modernity.

Beginning with long-term ethnographic work on conflicts around development and conservation involving Indigenous communities in South America and Canada, I introduced the notion of life projects to describe locally grounded visions of a good life that contrast with the universalizing aspirations of modernization. This work led me to articulate a political ontology approach, which examines how such conflicts are not merely disputes over resources or representations but encounters between divergent world-making practices, each with its own terms of existence.

In recent years, my focus has turned toward emplacement—the ways worlds seek to endure and recompose themselves through practices oriented toward the specificity of place. Across these phases, my research has remained committed to understanding how multiplicity persists and experiments with new possibilities as dominant frameworks falter.

My work combines ethnographic fieldwork, theoretical inquiry, and collaborative media practice with forms of militant research developed alongside grassroots collectives. These engagements—ranging from co-produced reports and public campaigns to advisory and legal collaborations—seek not only to analyze but to participate in the experiments through which worlds sustain and reimagine themselves.