I´m an anthropologist, writer, and lecturer based at the University of Bonn (BCDSS), and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).I broadly work on nature-society relations across marine, coastal, and urban contexts impacted by colonial histories and socio-environmental risks.For the most part, I grew up in maritime port cities – Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore. I received my graduate training at the Universities of Oxford and Bonn, while remaining close to my roots in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, theatre studies, and Anglophone literature (NUS, Singapore). I also possess a postgraduate diploma in counselling and social work practice (Bamberg), through which I independently work with early career scholars within the ambit of Humanizing Academia.
Founding co-curatorsPeter Kæergaard Anderson Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa Sayan Dey Damian Borovsky Welcome to the Reverberations Counter-Atlas!As an experimental, open-ended cartographic project, it brings into conversation wildly eclectic transoceanic “things” that flow, circulate, and sojourn – allegorically as reverberations – across and beyond Indian Ocean worlds,… Read More »Reverberations Counter-Atlas
Funded by the US SSRC’s Collaboratories for the
Indian Ocean region — a transnational network of marine scholars, activists, artists and practitioners committed to pluralising and democratising oceanic and coastal knowledge-
making across Indian Ocean worlds.
[ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ] |
Tracing gendered intergenerational taxonomic knowledge among shell gleaners in Zanzibar. Partner: Institute of Marine Science, Zanzibar.
[ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ] |
Tracing the contradictory meanings of ‘invasive’ and nuisance species through the sojourning stories of seagrasses and macroalgae in the eastern Caribbean (Bonaire & Jamaica). Partners: STINAPA, Dutch Nature Caribbean Association, and the University of the West Indies.
[ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ] |
Exploring the postcolonial political, folkloric, spectral, ethical, and techno-scientific meanings of urban mangroves in Penang amid rapid land use change, deforestation, and coastal reclamation. Partners: Univerti Sains Malaysia (CEMACS) & Bangor University
[ DFG-funded, 2020-2023 ] | A second-phase project following BlueUrban. Deepens an understanding into how global networks of floating city experimentation for living with sea change influence speculative infrastructural futures of Javanese urban centres, and their often terra-centric planning visions and imaginaries. Partners: National University of Singapore (Sociology), Universitas Indonesia
[ DFG-funded, 2016-2020 ] | An interdisciplinary project critically exploring how certain epistemologies and ‘best practices’ gain political traction and legitimacy as adaptation solutions to sea level rise and subsidence in Manila, Singapore, and Jakarta. Partners: National University of Singapore (Sociology), Universitas Indonesia, and Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Asia and the Pacific (Philippines)
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