Johnson’s research is historically rooted, ethnographically engaged, and focused at the confluence of gender, legality, and the ontological politics of sustainability. Her recent publications have appeared in the journals Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (awarded the 2017 Junior Scholar Award from the Anthropology and Environment Society) and Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management, and in the edited volumes, Loanwords to Live With: An Ecotopian Lexicon(University of Minnesota, forthcoming in 2018), Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research (Springer, 2017), Subsistence under Capitalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Mc-Gill-Queen’s, 2016) and Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Routledge, 2012).