C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Environmental anthropology – anthropology of ethics – STS – disaster studies – infrastructure studies
Research Area(s)
East India, Indian Himalayas, Europe
Departmental Activities
Working Group: Lived Utopias
Research Topic: Ecological Transformations
Profile
My thinking coheres around nature and the many ways people are entangled with their material environments. At present, I am following this interest by working through three sets of problems from the ground up.
I am interested in technologies of the self as mobilized in attempts to pursue greener lives. A recalibration of everyday practices appears as essential to counter environmental crises. My research concerns ideas and practices of reforming the self, tracing embodied forms of everyday activism and ethical striving for responsibility and justice on a wounded planet.
Second, I trace the reorganization of Indian forests as an attempt of carbon sequestration. My research reveals the hybridization of neoliberal policies as financial instruments hit the ground and contributes to emerging ethnographies of quantification and data infrastructures.
Third, I look at the fortification of coastlines on rapidly urbanizing, yet low-lying shores against the background of accelerating sea level rise. I combine political ecology and infrastructure studies in order to understand the making and remaking of coastal life amidst mounting crises, intensifying connections, and more-than-human becomings. I pursue this research as lead of the project stream Coastal Infrastructures under the auspices of the DFG funded ShapingAsia initiative.