research
I study nontraditional housing in the United States as a complex economic, material, and symbolic object. My ongoing research explores alternative housing lifestyles with regards to racial and class identities, environmental and infrastructural destruction, health disparities, social inequality, and urban planning policy.
The Trailer Park in the Sky
Manufacturing Ghosts in an American Mobile Home Community
Can a "mobile home" be haunted? This in-progress book project (proposal under review) explores the symbolic, material, economic, and physio-mental consequences of so-called "mobile home" owners' categorical exclusion from conventional real estate markets in the United States.
Project Publications
2018. City and Society 30(3): 293-317. DOI: https://doi.org/10.111/ciso.12181
Winner, 2018 City and Society Paper of the Year. Manufactured homes occupy a unique space in the American sociopolitical landscape. Colloquially referred to as “mobile homes” or “trailers,” manufactured housing’s ambiguous social, legal, and financial categorization produces continuous displacement pressure for millions of mobile-homeowners living in for-profit mobile home communities (MHCs). This article examines the consequences of mobile-homeowner disparagement as “trailer trash” through the case study of Isabel, a mobile-homeowner whose twofold eviction—of both owner and home—was justified based on her possession of socially undesirable (mobile) housing. Drawing on fieldwork in urban MHCs from 2011 to 2016, this article reconstructs Isabel’s story via the materiality of eviction and demonstrates a methodology for urban ethnographers who encounter displacement after the fact. Whereas corporate and municipal narratives attempt to delegitimize mobile home residents as “not quite” homeowners, reintroducing Isabel as an absent subject illustrates how potent sociocultural disdain produces, and even anticipates, the material ruination of “trailer trash.” [Housing; United States; Absence; Materiality; Ruination; Mobile Homes]
2020. City & Society 32(2). Virtual Issue. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12271
How does one write a post-facto ethnography of absence? The precipitous growth of eviction, foreclosure, and forced displacement worldwide has produced a groundswell of theoretical engagement among urban anthropologists. The aim of my paper was to make a methodological contribution to this scholarship, drawn from my own encounter with an absent subject, Isabel, and the material and affective ruins created from her unjust eviction from the Crown Court mobile home community (MHC) in Lincoln, Nebraska...
2020. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 43(1): 54-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12325
Although an estimated twenty-two million Americans occupy manufactured homes (MHs), less than one-quarter of MH owners title their homes as real estate. Instead, most title their homes as personal property, which offers fewer legal protections against sudden eviction or unit repossession. Drawing from five years of anthropological research conducted within urban MH Communities (MHCs) in Lincoln (Nebraska) and Boulder (Colorado), this article details the many complicating factors MH owners in land-lease MHCs consider before deciding to occupy depreciating assets titled as “chattel.” MH owners in Lincoln, for example, tend to emphasize the cost-saving features of their manufactured homes, in particular the lower tax rate and maintenance costs. By contrast, Boulder MH owners typically describe their homes as investments, and resist efforts to restrict or limit (mobile) home sales even when located in land-lease MHCs. Together, these case studies illustrate differing perspectives, motivations, and sociolegal contexts in which MHC owners claim respectability as well as citizens’ rights through “landless” homeownership.
2022. Journal for the Anthropology of North America 25(2): 94-113. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12170
Top downloaded paper (10%) for Journal for the Anthropology of North America. Although an estimated twenty-two million Americans occupy manufactured homes (MHs), less than one-quarter of MH owners title their homes as real estate. Instead, most title their homes as personal property, which offers fewer legal protections against sudden eviction or unit repossession. Drawing from five years of anthropological research conducted within urban MH Communities (MHCs) in Lincoln (Nebraska) and Boulder (Colorado), this article details the many complicating factors MH owners in land-lease MHCs consider before deciding to occupy depreciating assets titled as “chattel.” MH owners in Lincoln, for example, tend to emphasize the cost-saving features of their manufactured homes, in particular the lower tax rate and maintenance costs. By contrast, Boulder MH owners typically describe their homes as investments, and resist efforts to restrict or limit (mobile) home sales even when located in land-lease MHCs. Together, these case studies illustrate differing perspectives, motivations, and sociolegal contexts in which MHC owners claim respectability as well as citizens’ rights through “landless” homeownership.
#houseless
Voluntary vehicle residence, #vanlife, and America's affordable housing crisis after Grants v. Johnson
This ongoing ethnographic research project, started in June 2022, investigates the viral online #vanlife movement in the post-COVID era and following the landmark US Supreme Court decision in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024), which made the criminalization of homelessness constitutional. Documented via Instagram (@vanthrolife), I've lived the #carlife for more than seven months and 30,000+ miles across the United States, with plans to continue fieldwork in California in 2025-26. This project offers innovative theoretical and methodological insights for anthropologists interested in housing, inequality, and digital ethnography, as well as direct community engagement with voluntary vehicle residents (VVRs) and affordable housing advocates across the US.
Project Publications
Home-Made Renegades: the Hidden History of Tiny Homes (1890-1940)
In press. Reframing the American Dream: Tiny Housing as a Window into Consumer Culture, Political Landscapes, and Structural Equity. Shawn Bingham, ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Anticipated publication, Dec. 2024.
(Excerpt) In this chapter, I trace this hidden history of tiny housing back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how many defining features of the modern TH movement, such as simple living and individual aesthetic expression, were also present among its prewar predecessors. Enhancing the history of tiny housing offers at least two key insights of interest to TH enthusiasts and housing scholars alike. First, although much of the popular and academic literature on affordable housing understandably focuses on the experiences of the poor and working-classes, I believe that by including more middle-class perspectives on economic advantage, class aesthetics, and cultural traditionalism, we gain a more complete and realistic perspective on how people respond to housing crises across the socioeconomic spectrum. We can draw instructive lessons from nontraditional housing movements, past and present, to better imagine creative solutions to these (and future) crises that go beyond the limits of social convention.
fenceline narratives
Co-designing processes to integrate air quality and ethnographic data for community wellbeing
In collaboration with colleagues in anthropology, engineering, and public health, as well as community activists across the US Gulf Coast, this proposed ethnographic project aims to co-design, through ethnographic storytelling, resident narratives of pollution in fenceline communities in Mississippi and Louisiana that complement more traditional environmental data. Currently under review for the EPA Air Quality Information funding opportunity (EPA-G2024-STAR-D1), the objective of this community-based project is to integrate quantitative, qualitative, and ethnographic data streams to develop a more holistic representation of how air pollution is experienced.
