I am a Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar. My work centers Asian American collaborative resistance as a site for imagining environmentally and economically just futures in Southeast Louisiana. In collaboration with Vietnamese and Cambodian American commercial fisherfolk, my community engagement and writing practices reject the imperative for structurally underserved communities to be resilient to extraction, environmental racism, and the violence of the US immigration system. It also, importantly, underscores the power of mutual aid and collaborative, multi-generational resistance.

I am currently Assistant Professor of decolonial, anti-racist, intersectional feminisms in the Gender Studies Department at the University of Victoria, BC. I am also a Monroe Fellow at Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (2021-22).

I hold a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and have a scholastic background in Asian American studies, environmental injustice, cultural anthropology, and creative writing. Drs. Jigna Desai and Karen Ho generously and meticulously nurtured my graduate and dissertation work, and Drs. Todd Lawrence and Susan Myers were instrumental to my thinking as an undergraduate.

My book manuscript, provisionally titled Refugee Environmentalism: Restoration & Climate Migration in Coastal Louisiana, examines how projects of coastal restoration and disaster mitigation acutely impact Vietnamese/American communities who rely on Louisiana’s most ecologically tenuous fishing grounds. This work was nurtured by two postdoctoral fellowships: the UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship in UC Santa Barbara's Asian American Studies Department, under Dr. Lisa Sun-Hee Park (2020-21) and the Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellowship on Food & Water Justice in Carnegie Mellon University’s History Department, where my advisor was Dr. Noah Theriault (2019-20).