About me

I grew up between Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore. This sense of transoceanic drift continues to shape my writing and teaching, particularly in how I approach maritime histories and cultural ecologies. I hold a PhD in Development Anthropology and an MSc in Environmental Geography (Bonn, Oxford), with formative training in sociology, Anglophone literature, and theatre studies (NUS).

My research explores how empire and development continue to shape oceanic and urban worlds, and how precarity is unevenly experienced, sensed, and often disavowed across diverse settings. I am especially interested in whose knowledge comes to define crisis and ecological change, how these conditions are narrated, and under what circumstances certain voices are recognised as authoritative. 

Central to this work is an attention to how people become knowing subjects through everyday, frontline engagements with changing environments.This focus extends to multispecies relations, examining how unequal ecological relations take shape through practices of care, kinship, domestication, stewardship, and commodification. Much of my work traces the movements of aquatic species, people, sediments, infrastructures, and spectral figures, in ways that also show how uneven labours and burdens of repair emerge under conditions of extraction, overbuilding, and abandonment.

These concerns converge across four interrelated thematic areas: intertidal worlds, epistemic justice, multispecies sociality, and sacred and spectral ecologies. Methodologically I work with ethnographic approaches, integrating oral history, grounded theory, and folkloric practices.

Themes 

Over the past twenty years, my field-based collaborations across the Indo–Malay–Philippine archipelago and Sri Lanka have explored urban struggles shaped by wartime and post-disaster eviction, land subsidence, coastal reclamation, and the speculative politics of floating cities, while foregrounding how littoral collectives improvise and rework everyday life.

At present, I am completing my habilitation, Haunting the Developmental Sea, based on seven years of ethnographic research across island South and Southeast Asia. The project examines the interplay of epistemic and infrastructural dependence in semi-submerged and toxified land- and seascapes across Java, Metro Manila, and Colombo. It centers a cast of sojourning agents including coastal dwellers, restless ancestors, sediments, mangroves, milkfish, infrastructural ruins, spectral jasmine, and maritime cargo—whose movements shape what the sea returns and what it holds as a submerged archive.