I am a scholar of religion and waste, whose interdisciplinary research considers the materially messy, affective, embodied, and sensory ways in which religion is practiced and lived. Trained in material culture and media studies methods, my research engages questions of how people demarcate, orient towards, and engage with sacred things, wasted things, and things that move between these categories and/or occupy them simultaneously. By bringing together religious studies with waste studies—a field that considers how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued and devalued, become disposable or dominant—my research examines what happens when objects rot, deteriorate, break down, and fail.

My book project, Enchanting the Home: Rituals of Disposal, shows how disposal and divestment, like consumption, are spatial, material practices that constitute identities and communities. More specifically, my project traces the American decluttering trend, comprised of ideologically and geographically diverse movements such as Marie Kondo, Minimalism, Swedish Death Cleaning, Homesteading, Hygge, and Feng Shui, among others. Although these movements are ostensibly distinct, they all involve ridding the home of excess possessions in order to achieve health, happiness, freedom, and even salvation. My book shows how the decluttering trend enchants the home by attuning people to the dangerous and harmful power their possessions exert over them. By focusing on the elimination of goods, my book demonstrates how the enchantment of consumer capitalism relies on disposability, as much as it does on marketing, purchasing, and consuming. It further argues that the decluttering trend reveals a shared form of enchantment in the contemporary United States that takes inspiration from a wide array of religious and spiritual traditions, but is not reducible to any one.