Powell is a feminist political ecologist working in collaboration with rural, predominantly Indigenous communities facing various forms of health and environmental injury due to energy extraction, ranging from nuclearism to fossil fuels to emerging forms of “renewable” energy. Her research is strongly collaborative, and aims to elevate and amplify existing projects of self-determination, recovery, and justice. She maintains research relations and commitments in three places: Navajo Nation (since 1999); eastern North Carolina (since 2004); and eastern Taiwan (since 2021). While not equally active in all sites in the same way at all times, Powell advocates for a “resonant methodology” (Powell 2025) that is not simply comparative in the ethnological sense but resonates with common analytics (e.g., settler colonialism, resilience) across diverse sites.

“Ecologies of Energy” (2021-present / Taiwan)

This deeply collaborative, community-aligned project examines riparian relationalities and justice-centered concerns in two watersheds in eastern Taiwan (Hualien, Zhouxi Township) that are the ancestral lands of Bunun Nation/Peoples. Pushing beyond important work in environmental justice that centers in toxicity and pollution, this project centers the embodiment of dispossession and forced migration politics that enable industrial and “green” energy development projects along waterways that are anchors of community recovery from post-removal (Japanese and KMT era) policies. Following the theoretical and methodological pathways of Powell’s earlier book, Landscapes of Power, and its ethnographic attention to coal-fired infrastructure in the Navajo Nation, team examines the effects of a proposed hydropower plant on the FengPing River and the affective and procedural injuries that have resulted, despite the plant’s ultimate failure. The “Ecologies” implicit in this project expand to encompass changing relationships among humans with bear, deer, boar, and beans in the context of settler-colonial land policies and Bunun innovation. To date, “Energy Ecologies” has been supported by funding from Taipei Medical University and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council and has involved more than ten local and international graduate and post-graduate research associates. (Papers in preparation for Environmental Justice and The Journal of Disaster Studies) 

“Trailmaking” (2021-present / Taiwan)

In the same watersheds (FengPing and Lakulaku) as “Energy Ecologies,” Bunun youth and elders are revitalizing relations with ancestral trails, inviting a rethinking of “hiking culture” (as settler practice). This project is one of eight sub-projects in an integrative NSTC led by environmental sociologists Ming-Sho Ho and Jia-Ling Wu at National Taiwan University, to critically examine human-trail relationalities in Taiwan’s forests. As the Co-PI of this “Trailmaking” Project, Powell works closely with collaborating scholars YiFong Chen, Geographer, and Ying-Tzu Ena Chang, Education Studies (National Dong Hwa University); Panay Kumod, PhD Student, Univ. of Victoria, New Zealand; and poet and author Salizan Takisvilinian, in a field-based project to re-narrativize Bunun ancestral trails, shifting the storylines from Japanese “surveillance” pathways used for colonial rule, and contemporary Han trekking tourism used for recreation and leisure, to a Bunun-led analysis centering stewardship and sovereignty of these high-mountain trails. (Paper currently in review with East Asian Science, Technology, and Society)

Industrialized Bioenergy in Eastern North Carolina (2019-2023)

This project was curated through Powell’s involvement with the Eastern NC EJ Co-Lab and led by our community research partners in Robeson County and Sampson County, for whom the recent emergence of methane biogas and forest-based biomass extraction rapidly escalated as part of the state of NC’s climate mitigation policies. Concern over environmental health escalated with the emergence of new infrastructures, alongside concern for the lowland ecologies and waterways in the Lumber/Lumbee River basin. The Co-Lab expanded to partner with environmental and geo-spatial scientists tracking these forms of socio-ecological harm, introducing environmental justice theory and methods and community-aligned analytics to the expanding work. This project was supported by a Wenner-Gren Engaged Research Grant and a grant from the Research Institute for Energy, Environment, and Economics (RIEEE) at Appalachian State University. (Publications include: D. Powell et al. in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society; R. Witter et al. in Environmental Justice; and M. Tulbure et al. in GeoHealth).

Water Relations in the Navajo Nation (2019-present)

Powell’s longstanding work in the Navajo Nation began in the Summer of 1999, when she arrived as a team member of Honor the Earth/Indigo Girls’ campaign to support federal amendments to Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for Diné uranium workers and became formalized in 2004, when she began formal dissertation research. Her first book Landscapes of Power, along with other articles, maps the terrain of coal-based extractivism and its impacts on waterways and social conduits of Diné self-determination. Since 2019, Powell has returned to Navajo Nation to work with her original collaborator, Earl Tulley, to examine the Navajo Nation Water Rights Settlement (with the United States and surrounding states) as a political-ecological practice of anti-colonial environmental governance. This project began with a return to fieldwork in the Navajo Nation in September 2019 and twice-annual visits since, with travel support from Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2019-2020); School of Advanced Research (SAR) Long Seminar co-organized with Clint Carroll (2024); and is currently in review with Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council for additional funding (starting in 2026). (Publication by Powell and Tulley in Stranger Than Paradise edited volume; and new paper in review with Medical Anthropology Quarterly)