Research
Current Projects
The Weight-Inclusive Wellness Industry in North Carolina's Research Triangle
The dissertation analyzes the relationship between fat embodiment, place-making, and desire within weight-inclusive fitness spaces in the U.S South. Building on my MA thesis, a history of Durham, North Carolina as the “Diet Capital of the World,” my dissertation considers the development of a weight-inclusive fitness network. With attention to the embodied and emotional experiences of fat people, the dissertation considers how weight-inclusive spaces create new possibilities for fat people to make place. I focus on how fat people use these spaces to (re)connect to their bodies, form community, and foster fat liberationist politics. By examining the intersections of capitalism, racism, misogyny, and anti-fatness, I link the localized and embodied experiences in the U.S. South with national policies and discourses that present the fat body as a threat to national well-being and progress.
Previous Projects
Durham as the "Diet Capital of the World"
My M.A. thesis traces the historical development of Durham, North Carolina as the “Diet Capital of the World.” In my recent publication entitled, “Weight loss, Cure, and Temporality in the ‘Diet Capital of the World’: Disciplining Fatness in Durham, North Carolina,” I bring together crip/queer theory, feminist geography, and critical fat geographies to analyze the temporal and spatial dimensions of anti-fat disciplining. Building from archival data from the 1930s through the 1980s, I analyze the expansion of the dieting and weight loss industry in Durham. I analyze Durham’s weight loss programs and its reputation as the “Diet Capital of the World” to demonstrate the co-production of place and the fat body. I examine how places such as the Rice House and the city’s dieting landscape reveal the intimacies between place, temporality, and anti-fatness. I consider how Durham’s dieting landscape forcibly reorients fat people towards a future where their bodies are made scarce.
The Durham city directories, pictured above, formed a substantial amount of the archival work for my M.A. Thesis.
Miss Tourism Uganda as Neoliberal Development
As a part of Dr. Caroline Faria's NSF funded project on the hair and beauty trade in East Africa, my B.A. thesis examines the Miss Tourism Uganda pageant as a central tool for the promotion of tourism-based neoliberal development. Building on archival analysis, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and visual/textual analysis of pageant videos, advertisements, and other materials. This work was published in an Environment and Planning D: Society and Space article entitled "'I Want to...Let My Country Shine': Nationalism, Development, and the Geographies of Beauty." In it, my co-author, Dr. Faria, and I analyze the role of beauty pageants as a tool of neoliberal development. The piece calls conceptually for geographers to use geographies of beauty to study the impacts of neoliberalism and tourism-based development. We find that pageants rely on contestants’ labor to bolster tourism development, placing most of the complex work of national development on the backs of young women.
L to R: Jovah Katushabe, Catherine Kyotowadde, Kasfah Birungi, Annie Elledge and Caroline Faria at the 2017 Bride & Groom Expo