The Work

As a former winemaker and current Cultural Anthropologist (MA, SOAS University of London; PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), my work focuses on the intersection of food and labor. I believe my responsibility as an anthropologist is to document cultural practices, and use that documentation to help communities maintain sovereignty over their cultural lands whether that be farming, fishing, or hunting lands.

Growing up on the San Francisco Bay, I spent my youth seeking out salmon and diving for abalone. These were more than hobbies; they were cultural practices that brought my family and friends together to harvest from the ocean. These cultural practices were reasons to come home, to reaffirm our connections to a sense of place. Throughout my life, those cultural practices have gone away, threatened by climate change and resource mismanagement. I believe such traditions are the last defense against corporate overreach and the degradation of our public lands—they are the essential tools of food sovereignty and the primary means of maintaining agency over the future of our communities. Fisherpeople and gardeners are the protectors of heritage, curating a reality where humans truly engage with where their food comes from.

As an anthropologist, I have primarily documented industrial environments where work is reduced to a wage and labor consumes the body. I spent seven years as a traveling winemaker across five continents—tossing barrels, cleaning tanks, and operating heavy machinery in South Africa, Argentina, Australia, France, and California. My research is rooted in the lived understanding of this physical toll; it began through the observed degradation of my own body as I balanced the athletic demands of surfing and climbing with the heavy physical burden of sixty-hour work weeks.

Over the last eight years, as a researcher and activist, my work has focused on building public awareness around farmworker issues and as a union organizer and covert ethnographer in North Carolina’s Amazon warehouses. This website provides a sample of that work as I bridge the activist and academic spheres to document the maritime soul of West Cork. At my core, I am a writer. I utilize ethnography and poetry to tell stories about the lived realities of workers across the world. In this age of media, my work has come to encompass filmmaking as a necessary extension of commitment to the communities that I aim to serve. My fieldwork is not short-term. I spent a decade in agriculture and have been working with Amazon workers in North Carolina for over four years. I work to ingratiate myself with communities over time, using the lens to reach the core of what people are feeling about their lives and the labor that defines them.