About

RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND CONFERENCE PAPERS

• De Pree TA. The politics of baselining in the Grants uranium mining district of northwestern New Mexico. J Environ Manage. 2020 Aug 15;268:110601. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110601. Epub 2020 May 14. PMID: 32510424.

• Appelhans, S., & De Pree, T., & Thompson, J., & Aviles, J. A., & Cheville, A., & Riley, D. M., & Karlin, J., & Fatehiboroujeni, S., & Akera, A. (2019, June), From “Leaky Pipelines” to “Diversity of Thought”: What Does “Diversity” Mean in Engineering Education? https://peer.asee.org/32861

• De Pree TA. The (Un)Making of the ‘Grants Uranium District’: The Technopolitical Life of the By-product in Northwestern New Mexico.” STS Underground: Responsible and Sustainable Mining. Annual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science. 2018 September. Sydney, AU.

*See this virtual essay about teaching the remote General Education history course, “Atomic America,” at New Mexico Tech (fall 2020):

Click this link here: https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/afterlife-atomic-america-0/essay

Areas of Specialization: Environmental justice (EJ); disaster studies; sustainability studies; environmental health sciences, information, and governance; community-based participatory research (CBPR); traditional ecological knowledge (TEK); cross-cultural area studies of the North American Southwest

Discipline: Sociocultural anthropology; ethnographic methods

Areas of Interdisciplinary Experience: Political ecology; science and technology studies (STS)

Education

• Ph.D., Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (August 2019)
• M.S., Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (May 2019)
• M.A., Anthropology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University (May 2015)
• B.A., Anthropology and Psychology, University of New Mexico (January 2010)

Personal Statement
I am currently an ASERT-IRACDA postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (NIGMS K12 GM088021), key personnel in the Community Engagement Core (CEC) of the the UNM Metal Exposure and Toxicity Assessment on Tribal Lands in the Southwest (METALS) Superfund Research Program (P42ES025589), and an instructor in Environmental Science at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI). I have previously lectured at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.*

My academic research, teaching, and service are situated in the field of environmental anthropology, which combines ecological and ethnographic research methods to advance knowledge at the intersection of environment and society. I have an interdisciplinary background in the fields of science and technology studies (STS), political ecology, and Native American and Indigenous studies. My past academic scholarship is rooted in community engagement with the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE)—a regional NGO that coordinates the efforts of five local grassroots groups from the former Grants uranium mining district. Based on over two years of multi-locale ethnographic research on the relationship between local communities, government employees, and transnational mining corporations, my past research examined different stakeholder perspectives, the diverse forms of expertise, and the dense entanglements of science, technology, and politics invested in “reclaiming” abandoned mine lands, “remediating” contaminated sites, and “restoring” the natural and cultural resources of northwestern New Mexico.

My thesis is that the possibility of cleaning up the Grants district hinges on the “politics of baselining”–a term I introduce to describe the relationship between stakeholders and their competing environmental models and hydrogeological theories; each accounts for a different geological past prior to mining that can be deemed “natural,” as the background against which to measure the anthropogenic impacts from mining.

In my current role in the Community Engagement Core, I aim to advance understanding of how local Indigenous knowledge and sciences can transform population-based health studies aimed at developing strategies to reduce risks and impacts from abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) on community land uses, air, water, and health. Through interdisciplinary collaboration with the environmental and biomedical research projects, and with community partners in Laguna Pueblo and the Navajo Nation, we are co-designing “interventions” to attenuate environmental health risks and impacts. Building on a tradition of social science collaboration in environmental health sciences, our aim is to show how the inclusion of diverse stakeholder perspectives, and Indigenous perspectives in particular, can positively improve multi-stakeholder environmental cleanup projects.