Aaron is a PhD Candidate in Sociology with a Graduate Minor in International Development. As an interdisciplinary scholar, his work connects critical social sciences with environmental humanities, policy studies, international relations, and critical Indigenous perspectives. His dissertation is a qualitative historical-relational project focused on environmental discourses and mobilities in (and from) Micronesia. In addition to examining ways in which the United States conceives of Micronesia and the world’s oceans as extensions of the humanitarian/security state through racialized, militarized imaginaries of the technofrontier, his work examines counternarratives from Micronesian senses of place, heritage, futurity, and mobility practices. Originally from south-central Kentucky, he also maintains an interest in Appalachian Studies, particularly regarding settler culture, waterways, and political ecology.

Publications:

Padgett, A. (Forthcoming). Blue futurities: Confluences of geocultural power in the Pacific. Pacific Asia Inquiry.

Padgett, A. (Forthcoming). Properties of submersion: Case analyses of Continental Shelf extension. Fathom.

Grossman, K., Padgett, A., & Scott, R. (2024). It’s Grandpa’s land: Settler property, heteropatriarchy and environmental disasters. In Z. McNeill & R. Scott (Eds.), Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Econormative Ecologies (pp. 105-128). University Press of Kentucky.

Book Reviews:

Padgett, A. (2016). Review of David W. Kupferman, “Disassembling and decolonizing school in the Pacific: A genealogy from Micronesia.” The International Journal of Conflict and Reconciliation 2(2). 

Recent Conference Presentations:

Padgett, A. (2024, Oct. 18). Blue hegemonies: Confluences of geocultural power in the Pacific [paper presentation]. Annual meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association. Nashville, Tenn.

Padgett, A. (2018, May 19). Being (t)here: Critical autoethnography and the decolonizing self [paper presentation]. Annual meetings of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Padgett, A. (2016, Oct. 11). Rethinking subaltern positionality: Discourses of power within Micronesian-U.S. decolonizing relations [paper presentation]. The 9th International Conference of the Consortium of Transatlantic Studies and Scholarship. University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO.

Padgett, A. (2016, Mar. 25). Decolonizing pedagogy: Critical cosmopolitanism and the state of education reform in Chuuk, Micronesia [Conference Roundtable]. Annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society (held jointly with the North Central Sociological Association). Chicago, IL.