People

People

Below is an evolving list of people associated with the research kitchen. This includes the Core Kitchen who are people who actively work in the kitchen and Friends of the Kitchen who are people who have collaborated on projects here, participated in our core events, or who otherwise shape what/how we do.

Director

Zoë Wool

Zoë Wool is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and director of the TWIG Research Kitchen. Her work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist STS, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 warmaking and military harm and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States.

Projects Worked

 Ecologies of Empire | Mississauga Miracle | Project Pleasantville | US Military Burn Pits | Toronto/Tkoronto ChemMap

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Research Assistants

Kai Abimelek

Kai Abimelek is a master’s student in Human Geography studies at the University of Toronto. Their research explores the political geography of “home” through refugee placemaking and geographies of sleep. Using Autoethnography, Kai connects their personal oral history as a former stateless individual to placemaking theories. They were the CDHI Undergraduate Research Fellow on the Arab Women’s Writing Project at UTSC.

Projects Worked

Mississauga Miracle

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Jessica Caporusso

Jessica Caporusso is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at York University. Her dissertation explores the design and implementation of sustainable development projects in Mauritius, and the influence of colonial-era green imperialism with which these current projects are imbricated. You can find her work here

Projects Worked

Project Pleasantville

Sarah Chen

Sarah Chen is an Undergraduate student in the Arts and Sciences program at the University of Toronto studying Environmental Geography with minors in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Contemporary Asian Studies. Her work focuses on approaching environmental and food justice issues with a spatial and critical theory lens.

Projects Worked

Toronto/Tkoronto ChemMap

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Bradley Dunseith

Bradley Dunseith is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Following the ways in which food vendors in Mumbai, India dispose of wasted and rotten food items, his work explores questions of labour, waste, human-animal relationships, infrastructure, and urban ecology.

Projects Worked

US Military Burn Pits | Project Pleasantville 

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Meryum Fatima Hassan

Meryum Fatima Hassan is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, pursuing a double major in criminology and sociology. Her academic and research interests lie in criminal justice, social work, colonial institutions and their ongoing effects, and the needs of Muslim and other marginalized communities.

Projects Worked

Toronto/Tkoronto ChemMap

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Sophia Jaworski

Sophia Jaworski is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at UofT. Her research focuses on the uneven dimensions of chronic environmentally-linked illness in indoor atmospheres, including low-income rental housing and gender.

Projects Worked

Mississauga Miracle | Toronto/Tkaronto ChemMap

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Yasir Piracha

Yasir Piracha is an MD/PhD student in Anthropology at the University of
Toronto. His research focuses on chronic disease management, queer
health, utopian spaces, and sensory studies.

Projects Worked


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Katerina Richard

Katerina Richard is a Master’s Student in Legal Studies at Carleton University. She did her undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Mississauga specializing in Criminology. Her research focuses on critical education studies, prisons, punishment, and Indigeneity.

Projects Worked

Toronto/Tkaronto ChemMap

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Anisha Sankar

Anisha Sankar is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. She co-edited the volume Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022), and has been published in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice in Aotearoa, Overland Literary Journal and the Pantograph Punch. Her research looks at the contradictions of colonial capitalism.

Projects Worked

US Military Burn Pits

 

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Isha Sharma

Isha Dinesh Sharma is a Lester B. Pearson Scholar studying Architecture and Energy and Environment Science at the University of Toronto. Her work primarily revolves around design, technology, and the public sphere and sustainability through multiple research, mentorship, and leadership projects. You can find her work here.

Projects Worked

Toronto/Tkaronto ChemMap

 

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Meg Sheridan

Meg Sheridan is an Undergraduate student in the Arts and Sciences program at the University of Toronto, pursuing a major in Environmental Studies and minors in English and Sociology. Her academic interests are in socio-ecological justice education and constructed human-nature dichotomies.

Projects Worked

Toronto/Tkaronto ChemMap

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Contributors

Xan Chacko

Xan Chacko is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University. Her work complicates the taken-for-grantedness of scientific knowledge production to argue for a feminist re-envisioning of science that is committed to justice, including across discursive domains of biodiversity and food security. You can find more of her work here

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

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Adriana Garriga-López

Adriana Garriga-López is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. She is an anthropologist, poet, and performance artist whose work focuses on compounding disasters and climate change, with a focus on Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean region.  You can find her work here. You can also find her on Twitter at @anthrorican.

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

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Hi’ilei Hobart

Hi’ilei Hobart is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. Her research is broadly concerned with Indigenous foodways, Pacific Island studies, settler colonialism, urban infrastructure, and the performance of taste. Her book Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment on the social history of comestible ice in Hawai’i investigates the thermal dimensions of Native Hawaiian dispossession. You can find her work here

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

 

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Diana Pardo Pedraza

Diana Pardo Pedraza is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University. Her work focuses on (de)militarized rural landscapes, post-conflict politics and economics, and multispecies relations of aid and care in Colombia. Her current book project is called Landscapes of Suspicion: Making Peace in Rural Colombia’s Minefields. You can find her work here. You can also find her on Twitter at @Diana_Pardo_ 

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

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JT Roane

JT Roane is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Black Ecologies Initiative with Justin Hosbey. His work is broadly concerned with matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities, including the historicization of multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage. You can find his work here. You can also find him on Twitter at @JTRoane

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

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Eleana Kim

Eleana Kim is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. Her work is organized around core anthropological concerns with nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood and social value, including in the ecologies of the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ). You can find her work here 

Projects Worked

Ecologies of Empire

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Friends of The Kitchen

Ron Buliung

Ron Buliung is Professor in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at UTM and the Graduate Chair of Geography and Planning. His work focuses on the transport and health of children and youth in cities, including access to education among disabled children and youth.

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Waqas Butt

Waqas Butt is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and author of Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan (Stanford UP, 2023). Focusing on waste work in Lahore and the Punjab, his work explores the materiality of waste and value, histories of caste, stigmatized labor, and urbanization, and global circuits of development and capital. You can find his work here

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M. Murphy

Murphy is Professor in the History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, and director of the Technoscience Research Unit. Their work focuses on technoscience as it relates to environmental and reproductive justice, data politics, chemical exposures, infrastructures, Indigenous science and technology studies, race, and colonialism. You can find their work here

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