I’m a Seattle-based political scientist and professor. I want to understand how the world works, question the stories that make it seem inevitable, and help other people do the same. I also have an increasingly elaborate explanation for why another record is necessary.
I teach political science at Green River College and the University of Washington. My work moves between Israel-Palestine, immigration, nationalism, citizenship, and political demography. I’m interested in who gets counted, who gets to belong, and how states turn those decisions into apparently normal facts of life.
My research has examined asylum policy, hostility toward migrants, and the tension between governments looking powerful and actually governing effectively. My current projects follow related questions into public memory, everyday nationalism, and the political work of silence.
I’m interested in the gap between explaining an idea and giving someone a reason to think about it. I turn political questions into situations people can explore: an archive shaped by the world of 1984, a repression trap, a bargaining problem. With MUSE, I build AI learning bots that help learners pursue questions and examine their answers. This involves designing choices, testing prompts, making visual arguments, and discovering which instructions made sense only to me. Across these projects, I’m working on the same problem: how to give learners enough structure to get somewhere while leaving the judgment to them.
Serious ideas deserve clear language.
Ideally, they also deserve the occasional joke.
I write for people who are curious about politics without necessarily wanting to enroll in another degree. My public writing lives under The Bad Subject, my Substack for following these questions beyond the classroom.
Music and food belong here because they belong in my life. Post-punk, shoegaze, home cooking, arguments about authenticity: supposedly unrelated interests that keep becoming conversations about identity, memory, and belonging. Sometimes dinner is just dinner. I am working on accepting this.
Research, publications & current projects