My research integrates work in health-environment geographies with scholarship, both within and beyond the discipline, on the politics of knowledge, science and expertise. I am particularly interested in how people experience, know, and govern (real and speculative) health risks as well as how these processes shape the production of subjectivities, bodies, and everyday practices of resource use.

My current work examines how new human-environment interactions emerge through encounters with a severe and mysterious form of chronic kidney disease in Sri Lanka’s dry zone. Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology (CKDu) is a mystery illness that not only confounds scientific attempts to explain its cause, but it also evades systems of biomedical classification. Through my work, I zoom in on the daily grind of living in disease hotspots. Specifically, I investigate residents’ search for health in landscapes of disease, disease-related intervention, and intense and ongoing speculation about environmental risk.  

Empirically, I grounded much of my work in an analysis in two ongoing attempts to improve health in CKDu hotspots: 1) large-scale investments in water purification schemes, and 2) the roll-out of a national initiative promoting indigenous and organic rice cultivation as a “long-term solution” to the problem of kidney disease. In each case, I tack back and forth among stories about disease (CKDu); about toxic uncertainty (how science explains or fails to explain the disease); and about health improvement schemes (how state and civil society actors attempt to manage CKDu). Ultimately, my research argues that CKDu serves as a point of entry for understanding how health risks are classified, contested and managed, as well as how these processes rework subjectivities and practices of natural resource use.