Upon entering the warmest room in our house, we are greeted with the subtle smell of earth. In this room is a 36″X18″X12″ bioactive habitat with two small garter snakes (a blue-sided garter snake and valley garter snake). Most people in the USA have seen a garter snake of some sort as they are widely…
Category: anthropology
Texas Herping: May 2 & 4, 2020
Dr. Sarah Pollock and I braved the scorching heat (>95F) to look for snakes around little water around Culebra Creek Park. Special Guests: Lots of ribbons snakes and gulf coast toads.
COVID-19 and the Failure of Neoliberalism in the Face of Crisis
We are firmly set in the middle of a global pandemic at the moment. As it currently stands, the World Health Organization (WHO) is reporting just under 300,000 confirmed cases and 13,000 deaths as of March 22 with no sign of slowing down. This pandemic has demonstrated severe flaws in the system in the United…
Big Bend: Narratives of Isolation
“Splendid Isolation, the Big Bend…” is how the National Parks Services introduces Big Bend National Park on its website. My partner and I recently took a several day trip to Big Bend and, I have to say, it was truly splendid. Many of the sights and experiences I had were unlike anything I had experienced…
AES 2020 Abstract: Mediating Multispecies Relations Through Western and Indigenous Conservation
Western notions of modernity have situated human society apart from nature, which encompasses those spaces and beings that are unmodified and unsullied by human activity. The Western conception of nature/society can be contrasted with that of the Cofán—an Indigenous people of Amazonian Ecuador and Colombia—who identify as tsampini can’jen’sundeccu (dwellers of the forest). The Cofán…
The Liminality of Grief in Trauma
As time continues to press forward after the April 30 shooting at UNCC, I have continued to reflect, think about my experience, and discuss the experiences with others that were there and beyond. The summer is over and I am required to be around people more frequently. I am in a new city, meeting new…
White Men and Their Toxic White Fragility
It has been several months since the shooting in my classroom at UNC Charlotte where two of my students were killed, four were physically injured, and an untold amount of long-term mental, emotional, and spiritual harm was perpetrated. It is terrifyingly wide-spread the consequences of the shooting have been. It hasn’t just affected me; my…
Born to Be Cute: Charisma and Niche Construction
As a multispecies ethnographer and evolutionary anthropologist, I am interested in the ways in which ecological interaction between various taxa affects their selection pressures and evolutionary trajectories. I spend much of my time thinking about niche construction–the ways in which organisms modify their own and others’ evolutionary niches (Laland et al. 2016)–and how we as…
