Tracing the ebbs and flows of being and ecological belonging...

Welcome. I’m an environmental anthropologist and lecturer living between Bonn and Colombo. I broadly work at the ocean–urban interface, bridging maritime anthropology, critical development studies, postcolonial praxis, and the storied lives of water as a worldmaking force.

I hold a joint appointment at the University of Bonn’s Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where I lead POESIS, an interdisciplinary BCDSS–IDOS research group exploring how historic oceanic legacies and their speculative countercurrents intersect with enduring knowledge dependencies and unsettle the ways climate-changed futures are imagined.

I’ve taught maritime anthropology, environment and development, ethnographic methods, and critical reading and writing skills across the Universities of Bremen, Bonn, and Universitas Indonesia. Off the clock, I fashion home objects and scribble prosetry.

Training
BA (Hons.) in Social Anthropology, English Literature & Theatre Studies, 2004 (National University of Singapore, 2:1)
MSc. in Environmental Geography, 2008 (University of Oxford, with Distinction)
DPhil in Development Anthropology, 2015 (University of Bonn, summa cum laude)

Research & artistic collaborations

Tracing nature-culture relations, I often move between seacoasts, post-disaster landscapes, conservation zones, urban renewal projects, port terminals, and other material infrastructures. Places of immense contrast often interest me, where histories of extraction, overbuilding and abandonment meet everyday acts of care, placemaking and creative resistance.

Rooted in relational and affective approaches, my interests include oceanic imaginaries, the design of coastal futures and floating infrastructural visions, displacement and solastalgia, and, more recently, the politics of expert knowledge and multispecies labour in environmental repair. More-than-human relations between city and sea continue to shape my thinking, as do methods in the storying of socioecological crises along with vernacular understandings of dependency, desire, and everyday precarity in a time of climate (mal)adaptation.

My fieldwork and collaborations have taken me through Java, Manila, Penang, northeastern Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, southern England, Bonaire, and Jamaica, spanning long-form ethnography and arts-based research.

Beyond institutional life, I invest my time in Ink + Ethos a co-learning multigenre writing programme and the co-founded Southern Collective, an Indian Ocean-based arts-science network. I also serve as an associate editor for the journals Maritime Studies (Springer) and Ocean and Society (Cogitatio). For more.