Overview
My research examines how trauma, affect, and institutional power shape contemporary forms of harm across community corrections, postindustrial regions, and the broader infrastructures of American governance. Across my work, I develop a sustained inquiry into harm and its postindustrial afterlife, alongside a broader examination of violence and the institutional arrangements through which it is governed. I analyze harm, not as an isolated event, but as an atmosphere—an affective, material, and institutional environment produced through abandonment, structural inequality, and the long afterlives of industrial collapse.
Postindustrial Ontologies of Harm: Gun Violence, Addiction, and the Afterlife of Collapse
A central strand of my scholarship develops what I term postindustrial ontologies of harm—a framework for understanding how injury, abandonment, and governance co‑produce the conditions of contemporary social life. This work is grounded in long‑term research in the Monongahela River Valley of Western Pennsylvania, where communities navigate overlapping crises of gun violence, drug addiction, and the struggle for revivability. I examine how harm circulates as a material, affective, and political force, shaping the capacities through which bodies sense, align, and inhabit the world.
Rather than treating harm as an outcome to be measured or managed, I analyze the cultural and atmospheric logics through which harm comes to organize feeling, embodiment, and belonging. This work moves beyond conventional criminological frames by situating violence within landscapes marked by deindustrialization, militarism, and structural inequality. I employ a method of structural atmospheric attunement to investigate how affective governance modulates bodies and environments long before political meaning is articulated. This strand of my research contributes to interdisciplinary debates on trauma, violence, and the governance of postindustrial life.
Trauma, Community Corrections, and the Paradox of Double Exposure
A second strand of my research focuses on community corrections, policing, and the trauma histories of justice system professionals. My mixed‑methods study of U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services Officers documents elevated rates of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) across the workforce, with women and officers of color disproportionately affected. These early exposures intersect with occupational stressors—vicarious trauma, caseload demands, role conflict, and burnout—producing what I term a paradox of double exposure: officers are both survivors of trauma and professionals tasked with managing the trauma of others.
This research advances trauma‑informed approaches within community corrections by identifying structural barriers to resilience and by highlighting the need for confidentiality protections, leadership engagement, and organizational reforms. By situating officers within broader conversations on trauma, resilience, and workplace wellbeing, this work contributes to criminology, public health, and organizational studies. It also provides empirical grounding for policy discussions on officer wellness, retention, and organizational culture—areas of increasing importance within the discipline.
Interdisciplinary Focus
My scholarship moves beyond conventional criminological frames to interrogate the broader sociocultural and political economies through which governance and social order are staged. To this end, my work situates practices of control within the architectures of neoliberalism and structural inequality, clarifying how discourses of harm, security, and risk function not merely as policy instruments but as cultural logics that sustain contemporary systems of domination.
Drug Harm and the Necropolitics of Revivability
My research on drug harm and the necropolitics of revivability examines how addiction operates as a form of structural injury in the Monongahela River Valley, a postindustrial region where economic abandonment, chronic pain, and institutional fragmentation shape the conditions of everyday life. In this work, I conceptualize overdose not as an isolated crisis but as a recurring event within a longer trajectory of cumulative harm. I show how patterned vulnerability becomes the substrate through which institutions determine whose injuries warrant intervention, whose suffering can be tolerated, and whose survival becomes administratively useful. As these vulnerabilities circulate through emergency rooms, treatment programs, probation offices, and welfare bureaucracies, they are converted into categories of risk, need, and revivability, producing an interdependent ecosystem in which drug harm becomes both a resource and a rationale for institutional coordination. The analysis demonstrates how medical, carceral, and welfare infrastructures do more than respond to vulnerability — they actively reproduce it — revealing harm not as an episodic event but as a governing logic through which institutions organize, extract from, and circulate wounded life in postindustrial America.
Gun Violence, Masculinity, Authoritarianism, and Affective Governance
One line of inquiry examines gun violence, grievance, wounded masculinity, and the affective infrastructures that stabilize contemporary authoritarian formations. In my project Red Hats & Red Tides, I analyze how blocked opportunity, exhaustion, and vulnerability become organized into political coherence. I develop the concept of chromatic authoritarianism to describe how the color red saturates political and cultural life as a material force—structuring sensation, threat perception, and relief long before meaning is articulated. This work reframes authoritarianism not as a set of ideological commitments but as an affective environment that organizes bodies, emotions, and attachments. It further offers a vocabulary for apprehending how power operates atmospherically, binding subjects through grievance, sensation, and wounded embodiment.
Complementing this work, my Camouflage Economy project traces how militarized logics migrate across battlefields, electoral politics, digital platforms, and intimate life—weaponizing affect and embodiment as terrains of governance. By treating violence as both a structural condition and cultural choreography, I show how harm metastasizes across online and offline worlds, shaping institutional responses and everyday sense‑making.
Together, these projects contribute to emerging scholarship on gun violence, affective governance, political embodiment, and the sensory infrastructures of contemporary power. They illuminate how harm metastasizes across virtual and material worlds, reconfiguring imaginaries of conflict, belonging, and security.
Book Project: The Wound in the Valley: Collapse, Survival, and the Afterlife of Harm
The Wound in the Valley examines what takes shape after industrial collapse. Rooted in the Monongahela River Valley, east of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania. My account begins not with the moment the mills closed, but with the long afterlife that followed — a slow, settling harm that seeped into bodies, institutions, and landscapes for decades. Vivid scenes and an analytic method attuned to what lingers drive the book narrative. as it reveals how institutions manage harm, govern through injury, and people endure in the afterlife of harm.
Drawing on years of ethnographic research in the region, I trace how harm circulates through a place where industrial ruin has become a climate, shaping the rhythms of daily life and the possibilities of survival. In this world, the wound is not a metaphor. It is an interface between people and the institutional systems that govern them: probation offices, hospital emergency rooms, detox centers, plasma clinics, and the bureaucracies that decide whose injuries matter.
Through interviews, observation, and local narratives, I illustrate how structural abandonment is experienced as pain, grievance, nostalgia, and survival. In this world, men and women are recycled through the Mon Valley, altered by addiction, military service, incarceration, and economic abandonment — they are revenants of a collapsed industrial order and a gendered survival economy.
McKeesport’s “Main Street” (5th Avenue) shopping district today
Contribution
My research program is grounded in the vibrant tradition of the sociological imagination that challenges scholars to situate everyday life in the complex structures of history and social power.
Research Publications
Violence studies informs an interdisciplinary literature. Consequently, I find my work speaks to an audience of readers in Politics, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Trauma Studies. I edited and contributed to Social Text for a special issue on war and violence: Always At War: Economy, Labor, Life, and Blood. My article, “Mayberry R.F.D. Will Not Be Presented Tonight,” was published as part of this series. Another article, “War and Disability,” was published by The Feminist Wire.