i am a cultural anthropologist and queer theorist concerned with microbes, security, social relations, knowledge production, and the arctic. i am an assistant professor of anthropology at wake forest university and a core member of the centre for the social study of microbes at the university of helsinki. weaving through past, present, and future research is a concern for how people live or dwell amid damage, be that from security, homophobia, sex panics, the end of the world, or climate change. i ask: what animates politics in the crucible of inequality, oppression, dispossession, and destruction? i have developed a capacious anthropological definition of politics as how humans learn to live with one another, and through my research i have sought to situate this politics amid a damaged and fraught world as humans carve out spaces of survival, resistance, refusal, and abolition within such damage. my research explores the varied scales from daily life and everyday interactions to planetary events and modes of governance.