My current research projects are concerned with capitalist natures and the industrialization of labor and life in an allegedly post-industrial United States. My book-in-progress, provisionally titled Porkopolis: Standardized Life, American Animality, and the "Factory" Farm, is situated in the workplaces and wake of some of the world’s largest integrated meat corporations, which annually produce 7,000,000 animals in a 100-mile radius region of the Great Plains. On the one hand, the book is a microscopic examination of the cultural politics of bio-industrialization as labor inheres in the fissures of the porcine species—for example, in the pig’s reproductive instincts, its growth ratios, or its fat. On the other, it is an expansive ethnographic portrait of forms of imaginative totalization that underlie the making of the modern hog across every moment of its existence from pre-life to post-death. Moving from genetics facilities to slaughterhouses to bone-processing factories, Porkopolis depicts how the industrial hog is the product of an ongoing struggle over the state of American animality—including that of the human animal—with wide-ranging consequences for rural community, ecology, and agriculture. I am also in the early stages of a collaborative photographic exhibition on sensing animal proximities and industrial life, partly tied to this project. My future research continues to develop parallel lines of sight and argumentation. One planned public anthropology project is a broad history of "manual" labor, working-class embodiment, and sensory memory that is anchored by an ethnography of craft in the United States’ last remaining leather tanneries. Another developing project is an ethnography of animal-derived gelatin, a substance that is invisibly omnipresent around the world.

Industrial agriculture, animal studies, ethnography of labor, food studies, United States