The Architecture of Belief
I came to the study of ideology partly through lived experience. Between my Masters and my PhD, I went through a significant shift in my own worldview — the kind that makes you rethink not just what you believe, but how beliefs work in the first place. That experience drew me toward the questions I study now: how ideologies hold together, how they shape communities and decision-making, and what happens when they start to shift. It's a big part of why I study ideology — not as an abstraction, but as something that lives in relationships, communities, and the stories we tell ourselves about what matters.
My PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, gave me the space to chase that question properly. Working within the Ideological Conflict Project, supervised by Thomas Homer-Dixon, I studied how ideologies interact with the social networks and discourses that carry them — and how those dynamics play out across different governance contexts, from public policy to global institutions.
What I found is that ideology doesn't work the way it's usually studied. It's not just a property of individuals or a feature of whole societies — it's something that emerges from interconnections. That's what led me to complexity science and network analysis: methods that let you map the relationships between people, ideas, and institutions rather than looking at any of those in isolation. Mapping those connections is how I try to make visible what's often treated as background noise in political life.
Alongside my academic research, I do applied network and mapping work — turning relational data into something people can see, question, and use. I've taken that lens into several settings, including projects with Project Ploughshares, the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, and the Cascade Institute. The problems differ, but the conviction is the same: that you understand a system better once you can see how its parts connect. Working across academic theory and applied practice keeps both honest — the theory has to earn its keep against real problems, and the applied work stays grounded in how these systems actually behave. You can explore some of this in the portfolio section of this site.
I'm based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, and committed to research that stays intellectually rigorous without becoming inaccessible — work a curious non-specialist should be able to follow. If any of this resonates — or if you'd like to talk about research, collaboration, or speaking — I'd like to hear from you.