Tanner Humanities Center

The Standing Rock Sioux’s 2016 fight against the Dakota Access pipeline garnered a torrent of mass media and scholarly attention and situated oil and gas development (OGD) as an environmental justice (EJ) issue impeding Indigenous sovereignty (Estes 2019). Yet, multiple tribal nations currently rely on OGD for revenue and their perspectives remain largely unexamined by scholarly research. The Ute Tribe has been leasing land on their 1.2-million-acre Reservation in northeastern Utah for OGD since 1949 (“Notice of Lease Sale” 1949). Revenue from leasing has lifted the Tribe out of poverty and positioned OGD as its primary expression of sovereignty. However, the permitting process for a well on the Reservation involves a tangled web of environmental approvals from multiple federal agencies whose decision-making processes do not include the Tribe. As a result, environmental management has become a deeply contested political space, undergirded by issues of Ute sovereignty and EJ. In recent years production has moved from the remote periphery to close proximity with Tribal communities and is increasingly affecting life on the Reservation (UDOGM 2019). Tribal members have seen wells creep closer to waterways and ceremonial sites and air quality monitors on the Reservation have recorded unhealthy levels of ozone (Lyman and Tran 2015), a pollutant known to aggravate heart and lung conditions and cause premature death (EPA 2019). My research examines how Tribal members make sense of our1 complicated dependence on oil and gas in light of its EJ repercussions and asks how Tribal entanglement with oil and gas has shaped who we are as Nuchew2 (Ute people), our relationships to land, and our conceptions of sovereignty.

Ataya is an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes and a descendant of the northern Ute Tribe from the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah.Prior to starting her PhD at Berkeley, Ataya worked for the Ute Tribe and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an environmental protection specialist. In this position she reviewed agency NEPA documents assessing the environmental impacts from proposed oil and gas wells cited on Tribal lands.  During the five years she spent doing this work, she identified tensions between Tribal sovereignty and federal environmental oversight, particularly around air quality regulation. Her research seeks to better understand these dynamics and address the resulting public health concerns. Ataya is passionate about revitalizing the Ute language and is pursuing a designated emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization to strengthen her community's language curriculum and anchor her work in Ute epistemologies.

Identity? When 21st-Century Technology Collides with 20th-Century Social Scaffolding explores the societal friction created when consumer genomics became an unprecedented psychological mirror for humanity. As a silent and objective witness, it began to reveal fundamental truths that challenge our accepted narratives of history, cultural norms, and the traditional legal concepts governing identity, privacy, and medicine. It allowed us for the first time to view the concepts of race, ethnicity, and population structure through an unbiased genetic lens.  The scale and democratization of genetic data exposed deeply guarded family secrets through the discovery of false paternity and bypassed historical gatekeepers to effectively breach the social contract for closed adoptions and anonymous sperm donations. The resolution of decades-old cold cases, while serving justice, sits uneasily alongside notions of individual privacy and our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. As genomic research uncovered previously hidden genetic predispositions to disease, it exposed a growing rift between empirical science and the practice of medicine by clinicians ill-equipped to translate complex genetic risk into everyday patient care.

Scholarly and public discourse has long been polarized—forcing an ideological choice between strict biological essentialism and pure cultural constructivism. In contrast, my research attempts to bridge that divide. I take the position that we do not have to reject one framework for the other; rather, objective genetic data and shared cultural norms can, and should, coexist—not only to reveal a deeper, richer, and complementary sense of identity, but also to reshape our narratives around race, law, privacy, and medicine.

Kenneth Chahine (Ph.D., University of Michigan and J.D., University of Utah) is a scientist, legal scholar, and executive whose career focuses on the intersection of biotechnology, law, and societal infrastructure. As the founder of AncestryDNA, he pioneered the scaling and architecture of the world’s largest consumer genetic database. A patent attorney and recognized expert on gene patentability, contract law, and data privacy, he served as the legal correspondent for Nature and taught patent and entrepreneurial law as an adjunct professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. His strategic insights have been sought by presidential committees, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Health and Human Services. He has appeared as an expert analyst on panels and national news platforms such as PBS NewsHour and 20/20.

In 2025, there were both state-wide and national calls for increased nuclear energy production in anticipation of growing energy needs at the state and national level. Nuclear energy is a lower-carbon fossil fuel alternative, but uranium mining, processing, and waste storage needed for operation of nuclear generators have deleterious effects on surrounding environments and communities, and historically, Indigenous communities within the United States have disproportionately borne the burdens of nuclear industries. However, conversations around nuclear energy often don’t include the risks and hazards of processes along the nuclear supply chain—from mining to waste storage—or who bears the burden of those risks and hazards, while research about the effects and risks tends to focus mainly on uranium mining. In order to fill those gaps, I utilize historical analysis, focus groups, and interviews to examines the day-to-day experiences that White Mesa Ute Mountain Utes and members of the Navajo Nation face in regard to uranium milling, transportation, and waste storage, including the economic, political, health, cultural, and environmental effects; the perceived risks and hazards of uranium exposure; and how these communities respond to perceived risks, from changes in every day behavior to emerging collaborations between the two communities.

On October 3, 2024, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) released a “Record of Decision” confirming the forthcoming Interstate 15 (I-15) Farmington to Salt Lake City Project. The project would replace aging infrastructure and improve operational characteristics of the highway, but more pressingly, it would widen the I-15 freeway in Rose Park neighborhoods and displace anywhere between 25-30 residential units and 19-30 businesses. For the largely Latiné/x communities on the Westside, the sociohistorical legacies of redlining and the contemporary slow violence of gentrification are familiar and necessitate methodological attentiveness to “trust” as it relates to ethnic urban sociality. This dissertation explores the nascent rhetoric that emerges from Latiné/x urban life by focusing on the flashpoint of gentrification in the Salt Lake City “Westside,” as mobilized in the I-15 expansion. I focus on what I term “Westside Chismes,” which means the specific seen and unseen discourses – oscillating between government documents, community meetings, and qualitative analysis with community members – that render intelligible a rhetorical grapevine that textures neighborhoods belonging to the Westside. This dissertation attends to the complicated negotiations of visibility and belonging in two ways. First, my project seeks to position gentrification as a destabilizing rhetorical phenomenon, with implications for both city planning and urban rhetorical criticism. Second, my project attends to the brokerage of “barrio” neighborhoods by imbricating my rhetorical field methods (RFM) approach with a methodologically retooling of chisme [gossip]. Chisme, Spanish for gossip, offers critical insight into the interplay between social location, whisper networks, and polemics of distrust.

Over the last ~25 years biologists have discovered that lineages flow through each other and become entangled far more than previously appreciated. This has challenged traditional accounts of biological individuality, i.e., what we consider the edges of biological systems to be. For example, the New York Times recently reported on a species of ants that can produce offspring belonging to a different species. The authors of the scientific article that the NYT reports on describes this as “challenging the usual boundaries of individuality.” We are also, daily, learning more about how deeply intertwined microbial lineages are with our own bodies.
Newer accounts of evolution can better account for these challenging and surprising cases of overlapping and entangled biological individuals, from the microbial to evolutionary levels. My project develops and contributes to these newer accounts as an interdisciplinary philosopher of science. I describe this recent history and growing appreciation for the ways lineages may become intertwined. That includes how this impacts biological theory, how it has changed our concepts about biological individuals, and what methods effectively support good inferences about biology.
At its core, this is a humanistic project. It is about how we understand the world around us and how ought to regard the sorts of things we are sharing this world with. It is central to how we consider our own individuality when that is entangled and intertwined in a complex world we are only beginning to understand.

Speculation about the future of the suburban American dream has intensified, as climate change and economic conditions make the low-density landscape of single-family homes increasingly unviable. There is significant literature over the past 30 years on architecture, planning, and policy efforts to retrofit automobile suburbs for a more sustainable and economically-accessible future through incorporating urban densities, green infrastructure, transit-oriented development, and diverse housing types. Yet there has been little long-term research that explores the everyday, messy processes of transforming sedimented American ideals of suburban dwelling, as architects, planners, builders, residents, politicians, and developers negotiate aspirations for—and anxieties about—the material, social, and environmental future of the American suburb. What is being retrofitted is not just the built environment, zoning laws, governance structures, financing systems, and aesthetic landscapes but also long-standing associated cultural ideals, habits, desires, biases, and sentiments regarding suburban American life—a herculean task given how ingrained the suburban ideal is in most Americans’ affective, embodied, and epistemological habits. The ethnographic research for this book project, Retrofitting the American Dream: An Ethnography of Suburban Design, was conducted over a 10-year period in Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah. It will be the first book to provide longitudinal insight into how new imaginings of home and new habits of daily life can emerge, even in suburban areas initially considered unlikely sites for sustainable development.

Thematically, Safety: A Novel explores women’s relationships to firearms in the United States, and the societal trauma created by continual mass gun violence amidst a culture obsessed with firearm ownership as a right. Narrated by three liberal women who are part of a club of female gun-owners, including a journalist and an ex-paramedic haunted by her experience at a school mass shooting scene, the book explores the paradox of guns and safety, and experiments with the limits of narrative created by trauma.

My third novel, this project represents both a continuation of my longstanding interest in trauma as a space where language is tested, and a newer interest in using literary fiction to explore conversations heavily influenced by political rhetoric. While nuance has always seemed important to my work, it feels more vital than ever to understand what conversations, what richness, and which individualities are obscured and lost in polarization.

At the Edge of the Nile examines how the Nubian–Egyptian frontier was imagined in antiquity. At the First Cataract of the Nile, where the river crashes over granite to form a natural boundary, writers and rulers imagined a border not as a fixed line but as a dynamic, lived space. The project investigates how this frontier structured knowledge, authority, and cross-cultural interaction.

Each chapter focuses on a distinct aspect of the border. The first examines knowledge: how Greco-Roman writers and Egyptian temple inscriptions described what could—or could not—be seen and heard at the cataract. The second addresses movement: myths of wandering gods, ritual processions along the Nile, and journeys enact the border through travel, timekeeping, and religious performance. The third explores desire and difference: fantasies of wealth, racialized hierarchies, and gendered power projected onto Nubia, alongside narratives that disrupt these hierarchies, such as the Nubian queen Kandake in the Greek Alexander Romance. The final chapter considers the flood: the Nile's annual inundation as both blessing and weapon, focusing on imaginative and historical texts that show how mastery of the Nile shaped political and cultural authority.

Taken together, these analyses present the Nubian–Egyptian border as a dynamic space where geography, knowledge, the environment, perception, and imagination intersect. By tracing how Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Nubians imagined this frontier, At the Edge of the Nile reconceptualizes borders as active, contested, and inseparable from the ecological rhythms of the Nile.

What can listening to the past teach us about how we listen in the present? What do we “hear” when we read premodern texts whose orality and aurality were defining features of their creation and consumption? How do these texts thematize sound, music, and noise? What do their soundscapes amplify and what do they dampen? And how can we use written texts to listen to the broader history of classical Japan? I will use this fellowship to conduct foundational research for an innovative book-length cultural history of sound in Japan’s “long” classical period (ca. 8th–13th centuries). In it, I explore how acoustic phenomena were understood, described, and preserved through a range of media and genres, including tales, poetry, histories, picture scrolls, musical instruments, and natural ecosystems. Distant Listening combines methodologies from literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses to contribute a perspective grounded in premodern East Asia to the ongoing “sensory turn” in the humanities. By transporting the sonic practices of distant times and places to the here and now, this research aims to encourage a more critical engagement with sound and listening in our own lives.

“For All Latter-day Saints”: The Restoration Church of Jesus Christ and Queer Mormonism, examines the histories of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families, and Friends, as well as the gay-founded Restoration Church of Jesus Christ (RCJC). Drawing on queer theory, oral history interviews, and extensive archival research, the study explores how queer Mormons have navigated and reconciled their religious and sexual identities. Ultimately, Josh’s project demonstrates how the figure of the “queer Mormon” challenges conventional assumptions about religion, sexuality, and identity in the twentieth century.

Contested Ores: Mining, Medicine, and Money in the Dutch East India Company, a monograph that explores colonial resource extraction through the lens of history of science and medicine, is the first in-depth study of Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) mining activities in the Indonesian Archipelago in the early modern period. In the late seventeenth century, the VOC launched intensive mining operations for precious metals on Sumatra’s west coast. Miners from German lands, Dutch medical practitioners, local Minangkabau informants, and enslaved laborers mostly from Madagascar were uncomfortably brought together at the mining sites: a space where diverse peoples and the natural world intersected. I show that these mines, as zones of contact and contestation, shaped early modern European understandings of the environment, health and disease, and ethnic differences, in a process that exposed the limitations of European knowledge frameworks when confronted with local realities.

Mining was and still is a most violent form of extractivism, relying on migrant labor and foreign capital, with profound impacts on human health and the environment. Indonesia stands at the center of the global extractive economy today. By historicizing the ways in which knowledge and relationships were formed and contested at the mines through the interactions of peoples, environments, and ways of knowing, this project demonstrates that mining was far from a simple act of extraction, but constituted complex processes that prompt questions about knowledge and value in the early modern world.