I am a political economic and legal geographer focused on insurance— as a technology, an industry, and the spatial practice of underwriting. My broader concern is to ask how and why people (or things or places) become articulated as risk subjects at particular historical moments, or conjunctures. I study the public policy role of commercial and public insurance programs— where they emerge as discursive, market-based solutions in juxtaposition to other more transformative, non-market policy proposals.

I am especially keen to understand how the politics of actuarial risk assessment play into the spatial and scalar formation of carceral labor regimes. As such there is a duality to my work that I try to balance, which includes nature-society-oriented investigations of the National Flood Insurance Program and the unfree labor of incarcerated wildland firefighters in the Pacific Northwest. On the other hand, I take great critical interest in U.S. federal, state, and local carceral policy— including officer liability, electronic monitoring, and police union administration, member protections, and collective bargaining.