ABOUT

Since January 2023, I’ve been a Lecturer at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. As such, I both live and work as tangata tiriti on the ancestral lands of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākeil.

I specialize in feminist and anticolonial science and technology studies (STS), ethnographic methods and collaborative research strategies, and my research agenda addresses questions of social and environmental justice related to health, food and technology (in both disaster and design).

I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi (born on Hawaiʻi Island and raised on Maui), the beautiful lands of the kānaka maoli, who I support in their movement to regain sovereignty over their ancestral homelands. I did my BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (located on unceded Chumash lands) where I had the opportunity to participate as a student and facilitator in the innovative Education for Sustainable Living Program, and served as an inaugural intern in the LabRATS Program. After spending some time living and working in India, China and Japan, I moved to Europe to begin my MSc in agroecology, a double degree program with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and ISARA-Lyon. I was also able to spend a semester at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria, where I spent much time learning from agroecologists and participatory methods specialists at the forward-thinking Institute for Development Research. This provided me with an opportunity to participate in the 5th International Training Course on Organic Agriculture at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. That summer, I also participated in the inaugural Global Environments Summer Academy held at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. I graduated from my MSc program in 2012. My MSc research was conducted under the supervision of Professor Geir Lieblein, Professor Charles Francis and Dr Marion Casagrande, and explored consumer perceptions and actions related to food safety in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

I did my PhD in sociology at the University of Otago under the supervision of Professor Hugh Campbell and Associate Professor Katharine Legun, graduating in 2018. My dissertation drew on the fields of feminist STS, material semiotics and institutional ethnography to ethnographically explore everyday eating in the Kansai region of Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. More on this continuing research program can be found under research.

Following my PhD, I worked as a Postdoc and Research fellow at the University of Otago’s Centre for Sustainability. During this time I also began studying the material and discursive politics of new AI robotic technologies being produced for viticulture and horticulture in Aotearoa, and the collaborative research and collaborative skills necessary to create more (environmentally and socially) sustainable technofutures. Further details on these research programs can be found under research.