About Me

I am interested in studying how things hold together and come apart.

I am currently writing a book about how a building is made and is made possible within and across different kinds of practices. Variations of a Building draws on ethnographic fieldwork with architects, engineers, politicians, acousticians and in sites of public engagement. It is interested in the techniques of sharing in the act of creation, the conditions of a building project, and its political effects.

I am also currently interested in the challenges of making (environmental) noise “thinglike” in diverse knowledge practices, and what it means to listen to anthropogenic climate change. This research project is tentatively called “A Public Hearing: the standardisation of environmental noise and its contestation” and explores how environmental noise becomes a “matter of concern,” both in technoscientific governance practices and the “public fact making” practices of citizen science groups; the project is interested in how noise is heard, known and mapped in different ways, and to see how it is entangled in normative questions about public health, a good city, and the environment. Noise, in other words, takes us into the heart of debates about climate change and the anthropocene, challenging what it means to know and sense the environment.

I am a part-time lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Manchester. I recently completed my PhD there as well. Before that I received my undergraduate degree in Political Science and English Literature at the University of Western Ontario, and a Masters of Arts in Theory & Criticism at the University of Western Ontario.