welcome to the first post

a little about me

An improved version of this text about me was published in the Australasian Animal Studies Association’s (AASA) Animail November 2021.

I am currently in the last year of my PhD in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland (UQ). I work in an avian centric home and cohabitate with a combination of rescues, misfits and companion birds. My introduction to architecture was unexpected, my undergraduate degree was in linguistics at Michigan State University (MSU). It was at MSU in elective classes that I found myself mesmerised by how architecture intersects complex issues not limited to political, social and ecological concerns. After finishing my linguistics degree and working for a few years I decided to apply to a specialised master of architecture program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was here that my love of architectural history and critical theory ripened. I was fortunate to spend one year studying in Denmark at the Aarhus School of Architecture; here I worked closely with digital fabrication technologies and greatly improved my wood working skills. It was in Denmark that I entered a design competition that may have been my first involvement with human built architecture for animals. My project hønsegård for chickens didn’t win the competition, which was more interested in interior furnishings, but the project brought a lot of questions to me. Why do we build for chickens? Why do we build for animals? And how do we use these structures? Intersecting ideas about what it all means and how architecture is used in cross-species power struggles stuck with me. I moved to Australia to work as a graduate architect, I was somewhat surprised by how little the wild animals were considered in the projects I was working on. I decided to send an email out into the dark in a hope to start doing higher research, and as luck would have it Sandra Kaji-O’Grady at UQ was looking to supervise research that intersects human-animal studies with architecture. I send my warmest and most sincere thanks to Sandra for all her guidance, as I know I wouldn’t have found my niche if it weren’t for her. Today I am pleased to be working between architecture and human-animal studies and my PhD works to reveal the histories of architecture built for birds. I hope that in exploring these histories we can better understand the present. Last year I presented, ‘Battle Birds,’ at a Re-appropriation and Representation via Drawing On. This was a design exercise that explored how roosters are situated as avatars in cockfighting and the constructs of power that are present within the architecture of the cockfighting arena. Additionally, it explored the gendered space of cockfighting and chicken husbandry. I hope in the coming months and years to produce quality contributions to human-animals studies that examine the role of architecture and architectural theory within current and historic modes of building for birds.

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“She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.” -Mark Twain