I’m an American ex-pat living and working in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. I have a PhD, which probably suggests that I think too much, read too often, and exercise too little. Furthermore, I’ll openly admit: I have my fair share of concerns.
The financial crisis of 2007-08 fundamentally altered my sense of reality and I must confess I’ve been shit-scared ever since. As if that maelstrom wasn’t enough, I–or rather, we–must now learn to live not only within the uncertain shadows cast by the Great Acceleration, human-induced climate change and the sixth mass extinction, but also with the deeply disconcerting knowledge that human activities are responsible for ushering in an entirely new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Taken collectively, these harrowing events underscore a deeply pressing need to reimagine the world. This work must be done by everyone. Although not entirely dedicated to this task, parts of this website constitute a modest attempt to contribute to that collective and urgent reimagination.
My past professional activities have followed the contours of more traditional scholarly activities such as teaching, researching, publishing, and presenting, but starting in 2024-25 my intent is to take my professional energies in some new directions. In this work I aim to bring together disciplines that might normally be considered strange bedfellows: pedagogy + anthropology, for example, as well as pedagogy + gastronomy, but also pedagogy + pedology. We left normal long ago, however, so I enthusiastically alchemize such disciplines for the explicit purpose of breathing new life, as well as new pleasures, into educational practices and environments. Starting in January 2025 I also plan to debut a modest-but-earnest Substack (newsletter) project, “Watermelons Can Teach,” dedicated to eliciting the pedagogical dimensions of the work of Bruno Latour, a highly influential–yet often misunderstood–French philosopher and anthropologist of science who sought to revolutionize our contemporary ideas about science, society, nature, modernity, and more. Sadly, Monsieur/Professeur Latour passed away in October 2022.
What else to know about me?
Truth be told, I prefer noticing over counting, opening over closing, exploring over explaining, expanding over exhausting, and existence over essence. I also find great pleasure in photography. If I were to be reincarnated as another human I should like to be Bruno Latour or Anna Tsing. If my future destiny is to take a non-human form, well then let me be a European larch tree (Larix decidua) perched high in a remote valley somewhere in the European Alps or an arcus cloud formation lingering just off of the coast of Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes.
