My body of scholarship explores intersections between language, political economy, aspiration, and embodied social inequality. I explore these areas in three different global contexts (1) Large scale resource extraction in the arctic (Canada, Alaska, Finland), (2) The transnational governance of extractive industries, and (3) Contemporary wellness and fertility efforts in North America. My engagement with these themes began as I critically analyzed the changing place of Indigenous life and arctic extractive environments in (inter)national public culture. This work culminated in my book, Under Pressure: Diamonds and Everyday Life in a Norther Town. (2023, University of Toronto Press, Teaching Culture Series). Fieldwork in the same region also led to a co-authored book looking at intersections of language, class and extractive driven migration entitled Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation (Oxford University Press 2016). 

My second project looked at the transnational configuration of “transparency” across the gemstone supply chain. Funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropology and the Swiss National Science Foundation, the research linked my ongoing anthropological research on diamond harvesting and corporate ethics in Canada’s arctic to an examination of the enactment of corporate ethics of transparency on a broader scale. Some of our findings culminated in a recent special issue of TSANTSA: Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association (coedited with Filipe Calvão & Matthieu Bolay) entitled “Dis/connection matters: Natural, Synthetic, and Digital”. In our contribution, “Ashes to Diamonds: Making lab-grown afterlife”, co-author Calvão and I look at the emergence of diamonds made of cremated human remains and the technical and semiotic work involved by those who make and market them. 

Finally, my most recent and ongoing work is interested in people’s experiences with feminized medical problems such as weight gain and infertility—as well as the interventions said to assist with these issues. I have published on the racializing health discourses in pre-diabetes prevention programming on college campuses (Bell 2019). My own experiences of infertility have led to new research on embryo imaging. The project “Picturing Embryos” investigates the social impact and cultural meanings of images of human embryos. Specifically, the research seeks to understand the uses and interpretations of embryo images by those who have undergone InVitro Fertilization (IVF) in Canada or the United States. Technologies that allow us to see parts of the reproductive process often change how we view and understand the process itself. While advances such as still and time lapse microscope photography provide new tools for documenting embryo development, we don’t yet know what effects these technologies have on the patients and related parties who receive them. The research puts the social science of medicine into conversation with theories in semiotic, visual and cultural anthropologies.