About Me
Current Roles
- Assistant Professor of Applied Anthropology, Texas State University
- Director of the Innovative Anthropologies Lab, Texas State University
- Web Producer, Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, & Computing (CASTAC)
Education
- PhD, Anthropology, Binghamton University
- MA, Anthropology, University of Southern Mississippi
- BS, Anthropology, Grand Valley State University
I am an Anthropologist.
IYKYK. If not, here’s the short version. Sociocultural anthropology is a deeply immersive and primarily inductive approach to studying human lives, culture, and society. We are trained to get comfy down in the profound and deeply uncomfortable complexity of human experience. We are out here observing, participating, and talking with people where they are at—amassing richly detailed data about how humans live, how we make decisions, what we value, and how those interact with sociocultural systems of power and meaning, our bodies, our language, and our material environment. We do all this while maintaining a vast perspective on human diversity across time and space. We aim to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange—challenging our assumptions about what it means to be and live as a human. In this space, we can be truly innovative thinkers as we are capable of documenting not only what is and why—but what is possible beyond our assumptions.
I study innovation.
My work sits at the intersection of business anthropology, design anthropology, and science and technology studies. I am fascinated by the ways that we organize and mobilize our resources, stories, and ideas to drive social and cultural change. This interest took me to Stockholm, Sweden—known for producing more innovative, billion-dollar unicorn companies per capita than anywhere in the world (except sometimes Silicon Valley)—to study the extremely powerful and globally pervasive practice of innovation through entrepreneurship. With both a PhD in anthropology and a professional background in design and technologies, I am both excited by the possibilities of entrepreneurial innovation and critical of it’s frequent shortsightedness, capitalist constraints, and shallow understanding of humanity. I seek to harness the power of the anthropological perspective to challenge the hype and bullshit around innovation. I aim to document how entrepreneurial systems and infrastructures of innovation work, for whom, and why—then contextualize that within a wider scope of human innovation to inspire innovative thinking around innovation.
I am a designer, etc.
In addition to my anthropological training, I have more than 20 years of professional experience outside of academic anthropology. As a first-generation college student from a low-income household, my career in higher education has been defined by the need to maintain a parallel patchwork career for subsistence.
After developing skills during my BS and MA, I transitioned to a 13+ year career as an applied anthropologist. I worked primarily for non-profits (e.g., community organizations, institutions of higher education, libraries, etc.) that could not normally afford the luxury of an anthropologist on staff or contract. So, I developed a wide array of skills beyond anthropology, including web design, back-end web development, system administration, graphic design, marketing and branding, organizational strategy, and program evaluation. Both as a full-time employee and as a freelancer, I combined my anthropological research skills and expertise with these technical and artistic skills to produce anthropological-informed designs and solutions at low costs with big impacts.
TL;DR
I'm a sociocultural anthropologist researching technologies, innovation, and business as an assistant professor at Texas State University. In addition to a PhD in anthropology, I have more than thirteen years of experience as an applied anthropologist in information technologies, design, marketing, and organizational strategy. My work sits at the intersection of business and design anthropology and science and technology studies. I examine how ambitions for better futures by states, citizens, and entrepreneurs are shaped by innovation culture and its infrastructures. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Stockholm’s "unicorn factory" entrepreneurial ecosystem, revealing the interplay between hype stories and innovation practice.