The central question animating my research is: How do Caribbean communities navigate the persistent ruins of colonialism and environmental crisis to actively imagine—and bring into being—alternative, livable futures?
My research agenda is structured across three core, intersecting projects:
Cultivating Time: Coffee, Heritage, and the Labour of Endurance in Martinique
Status: Book manuscript in preparation.
What does it take to tend to the future when progress is elusive? Moving beyond scholarly tropes of Caribbean “resistance” or “resilience,” Cultivating Time argues that endurance is not passive survival, but an active, skilled, and forward-facing practice of living on through uncertainty. The book explores this discipline through the lives of Martinicans participating in the Legend Coffee Project—an ambitious agricultural heritage initiative to revive the island’s once-renowned Arabica coffee production. Grounded in thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, the narrative follows farmers, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs navigating a striking irony: an intense institutional momentum building around a crop that barely exists. Rather than treating this stalled momentum as a tragic postcolonial impasse, I demonstrate that a generative momentum operates within the stall itself. For these actors, carrying on is a vital refusal to cede the land, the story, or the future.
Fires Beneath the Water: Claiming a Tectonic Future
Project Status: Active multi-year ethnographic fieldwork and seismic data collection (ongoing since 2022).
While Caribbean disaster studies have long been dominated by the seasonal, cyclonic rhythms of hurricanes, Fires Beneath the Water shifts the analytical lens toward geological time and volcanic latency. The volcano represents a quiet, subterranean accumulation of force. This project tracks the long meanwhile of an impending but uncertain eruption, investigating the lived experience of volcanic anticipation in Martinique.
Thinking with Édouard Glissant’s assertion that “we understand the world better if we tremble with it,” this project develops a tectonic imaginary. I position the volcano as a vital non-human entity that dictates rhythms of value, surveillance, and sociality. I argue that volcanic latency fosters deep networks of care and solidarity that transcend traditional flag nationalism, offering prehistoric and geological foundations for contemporary collective action across oceanic boundaries.
This project employs a multi-modal approach, culminating in two distinct but tethered texts:
- The Scholarly Monograph: An ethnography featuring research conducted alongside the Volcanological and Seismic Observatory of Martinique, oral histories, and interviews with residents in high-risk northern regions.
- The Speculative Novel (From the Ashes): A histofuturist work drawing on archival data from previous eruptions to imagine the ethical, social, and reparative possibilities of a post-catastrophe Martinique.
Dust to Decay: Sargassum, Sand Haze, and Other Transoceanic Intimacies
Project Status: Active research phase; expansion into a multi-sited ethnography linking the Francophone Caribbean to wider transoceanic networks.
Dust to Decay investigates the social life of environmental particulates, tracing how cumulative disturbances link the island of Martinique to distant geographies—from the Sahara Desert to the Sargasso Sea. The project maps two primary transoceanic phenomena converging in the archipelago: sargassum algae blooms that decay on shores releasing toxic gases, and transatlantic plumes of Saharan dust hazes.
Rather than framing these recurring events through standard technocratic tropes of “resilience,” this project develops an analytic of elemental relation. I look closely at the affective registers of slow violence: How do communities maintain a sense of place when their primary, everyday sensory experience is defined by the grit of foreign dust and the stench of sulfur? By focusing on how microscopic particles create taxing atmospheric realities, this work pushes toward a more rigorous engagement with the materialities of the air we breathe and the interconnected ecologies of global harm.
