In the language of the academy, I am an interdisciplinary social scientist and humanist. I prefer to think of myself as supra-disciplinary, or even undisciplined. I teach and study at the intersections of surveillance, technology, media, and race. My recent work focuses on the mediated visibility of police violence.

I am currently an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island College, where I teach Sociology and Justice Studies. Until this year, I was a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I taught in the Crime, Law, and Deviance area.

I am working on a book called Race & Policing: From Slave Patrols to Mass Incarceration, which focuses on the historical co-origination and mutual reproduction of the unique race and police institutions in the United States.

My most recent publications have been in Big Data & Society and American Studies Journal, and a book called Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance (AK Press, 2017).

In 2015-16, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center For Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College. There, I continued research from my dissertation on the mediated visibility of racialized police violence. While at Amherst College, I published in Media & Communication and Surveillance & Society. The latter article won the 2016 Early Career Researcher award from the Surveillance Studies Network.

I finished my PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in August 2015. My dissertation is titled “Watching Police Violence: Negotiating the Politics of Visibility.” Langdon Winner chaired my doctoral committee and examined the dissertation along with members Nancy D. Campbell and Mike Fortun, and outside members David Murakami-Wood (Sociology, Queen’s University, Canada) and June Deery (Media & Communication, RPI). In 2013 and 2014, I was a researcher in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center. While at RPI, I published in Humanity & Society, Anarchist Studies, and Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, as well as chapters in The Surveillance Industrial Complex: A Political-Economy of Surveillance (Routledge, 2013) and Policing The Campus (Peter Lang Books, 2013).

Prior to my doctoral studies, I earned a MA in Sociology at Northern Arizona University, where I also acted as the coordinator for the Laboratory for Applied Social Research. I earned an interdisciplinary Bachelor’s degree from the Honor’s College at Kent State University, with minors in Women’s Studies and Sociology, and extensive coursework in Pan-African Studies.

I serve on the editorial board of Criminological Encounters and on the advisory board of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies.