My research moves between interpretation and use.

I conduct interviews, participant observation, focus groups, photovoice and other arts-based inquiry, program evaluation, literature reviews, and organizational research. I am particularly attentive to what conventional measures fail to register: embodiment, relationship, power, access, contradiction, and the knowledge people make from experience.

In Archiving the Trauma Diaspora: Affective Artifacts in the Higher Education Arts Classroom, I developed the ideas of a trauma diaspora, an affective archive, a diasporic trauma archive, and the trauma-sensitive artifact. I studied what art objects and classroom encounters could make legible about trauma, embodiment, narrativity, and recognition.

My present questions also arise in community writing, exhibitions, meals, and institutions: what forms can people make together that support care, agency, meaning, and belonging while housing instability and other destabilizing conditions are still happening? This is work in progress, alongside the continuing Trauma Diaspora book project.