Explore My Work
A Life of Asking Different Questions
For decades, I’ve been interested in a deceptively simple question:
What would it take for people to truly thrive?
That question has taken me through science and academia, health and body politics, social justice, and ultimately toward a deeper exploration of belonging, healing, and how we create communities capable of holding both difference and connection.
My work has evolved. But the underlying commitment has remained the same:
to understand the forces that shape our lives—and imagine better possibilities.
What I’m Working On Now
A Different Way to Do Social Justice
My current work asks what social justice might look like if we placed belonging, accountability, compassion, and healing at the center.
I’m particularly interested in the tension between two things we need:
the courage to confront injustice and the capacity to remain connected across our differences.
Explore This WorkCurrent Writing & Ideas
I’m developing new writing about belonging, compassionate accountability, healing, relationships, and the ways social justice movements can become more humane and effective.
Read the IdeasFrom Bodies to Belonging
Radical Belonging
Eventually, my questions became larger.
If our bodies are shaped by the worlds we live in, what about our sense of self? What happens when we are told, explicitly or implicitly, that we don’t belong?
Radical Belonging explores othering, trauma, connection, and the possibility of creating a world in which belonging isn’t something we have to earn.
Explore Radical BelongingFrom changing how we understand bodies to changing how we understand belonging.
Changing How We Think About Bodies
Health at Every Size
My early work challenged the assumption that health can be understood simply by looking at a person’s weight.
Through research, writing, teaching, and advocacy, I helped bring attention to the ways that weight stigma, social inequality, and our cultural obsession with weight shape health and well-being.
Explore Health at Every Size
Body Respect
co-authored by Lucy Aphramor
Body Respect, coauthored with Lucy Aphramor, brought together scientific evidence and a social-justice perspective to examine what actually influences health—and why conventional approaches to weight so often fail us.
Explore Body RespectSpeaking & Teaching
Bringing These Ideas Into Conversation
I’ve spent much of my career teaching, researching, writing, and speaking about subjects that can be difficult to talk about: bodies, stigma, inequality, identity, trauma, social justice, and belonging.
Today, I’m especially interested in conversations that move beyond “Who’s right?” toward more generative questions:
What are we learning?
What would repair look like?
What kind of community are we creating?
And does the way we’re treating one another reflect the world we’re trying to build?