My research focuses on three major research streams. Across these areas, my work contributes to the growing research tradition of problem-solving sociology. In the first stream, I focus on people’s relationships with the environment, investigating how these relationships are developed and maintained, how they are understood, and how they lead to environmental stewardship. I investigate positive relationships with the environment as one path through which, as research has demonstrated, care for the environment can emerge and be maintained. In this stream I also investigate how successful initiatives for helping people develop relationships with the environment have been implemented. A paper from this stream has been recognized in 2025 with the Jane Goodall Award for Student Scholarship from the Animals & Society Section of the American Sociological Association.

In the second stream, I use computational social science to understand the cultural meanings of environmentally significant phenomena, such as meat and invasive species. In this stream, my work demonstrates how cultural meaning functions as a primary component of attempts to both obstruct action on social problems and to solve them.

In the third major research stream, I work with community organizations to investigate justice and coloniality in environmental issues. In these projects with community partners, I develop research products such as policy briefs for organizations and contribute to scholarship on the intersection of environmental issues, social justice, and decolonization. This work includes a project on how decolonization initiatives have been implemented in Canadian organizations, and a project on regulation in New Mexico’s oil and gas industry. Undergraduate students are given opportunities in my classes to participate in these projects.