Biography

Raised between Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore, I’ve always been drawn to the spaces in between. This sense of drift and crossing continues to shape how I approach my work as a writer, anthropologist, and lecturer exploring cultural ecologies in the Indian Ocean world and the Asia-Pacific.

I am particularly interested in how intersecting logics of empire and development continue to shape coastal and urban frontiers—and how precarity itself is imagined, disavowed, and differently valued across these spaces. In continually asking whose knowledge counts in defining environmental crisis and why, these inquiries guide my research across four thematic areas: intertidal worlds, epistemic justice, multispecies relations, and speculative infrastructures.

I hold a joint appointment at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where I coordinate the partnership programme and co-lead the research group POESIS (“Power, Equity, and Epistemic Dependencies in Oceanic Spaces”). I also serve on the editorial boards of a new Springer book series Marine Social Sciences and the Blue Humanities, together with the journals Ocean and Society and Maritime Studies.

I’m presently completing my habilitation project, Haunting the Developmental Sea, based on seven years of ethnographic research in the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago. This work explores the interplay of epistemic and infrastructural dependencies in semi-submerged landscapes, focusing on ghostly afterlives in the wake of littoral extraction, overbuilding, and abandonment.