Law at the border

I am primarily interested in the mechanics of the Canada-US border, the banalities of the 'friendly border' as they play out in everyday life. This often means I am concerned with the function of courts, particularly the post-Charter Supreme Court of Canada in making borders and ports of entry unique legal spaces. As judges ask 'what kind of legal space is a border?', my work identifies the tools and approaches through which legal practitioners go about answering that question and the geographies such work produces.

I'm interested in all formulations of the border and bordering--from trusted traveller programs to the expansion of surveillance in public space. As border-work has increasingly fallen into and been conflated with counter-terrorism, I examine moves both by state and non-state actors that see the border as a security apparatus along with the development of new technologies of screening and data collection that now accompany what I broadly recognise as 'border-work'.

Oral histories

Critical foodways studies

I am interested in questions around identity and community, and these often come back to the dinner table. While many scholars have focused on questions of production, I am interested in questions of consumption and how food is both a consumer choice but also a discursive methodology through which larger platforms of identity, culture, economy, history, environment, and politics can be examined. This often means exploring what we cook, eat, and share and how that work is done. Who cooks? Who serves? Who eats? 

My training first and foremost as a legal geographer informs this research and law or quasi-legal approaches often mark my analytical approach. This may be in an examination of organic food labelling pratices, a history of food packaging and marketing practices in the post-World War II era, or bylaw enforcement in the production of regional foodways. Divided between Canada and the US South, my interest in food often speaks to these tables--and how dishes, customs, and histories are taken up in the Canadian and American Southern contexts.