C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
anthropology of outer space, materiality of script, materiality of ethnographic writing, relationality, new materialism, astronomy, universality of science, decolonization in southern Africa, boundary work of Africa, anthropology of religion
Research Areas
Madagascar, Indian Ocean, East Africa / Southern Africa, Tanzania
Departmental Activities
Working Groups: Lived Utopias | Science and Universality
Research Topics: Techno-optimism
Profile
My work centres on questions of materiality, diffraction, and (non-)representation. I am interested in how people live concepts and how this affects academic practice.
With a BA in Anglistics and Elementary Mathematics and a MA in African Studies, I completed my doctoral degree at the intersection of Anthropology and the Study of Religion. The thesis examined written Qur’anic verses that are washed off and drunk as medicine in Zanzibar Town, by both Muslims and Christians. It scrutinized implications of writing about liquefied text and developed a “diffractive ethnography”. I am currently composing a book manuscript based on this research while commencing my new research project on the emerging astronomy infrastructures in Madagascar. Regionally, I remain committed to the intersections of Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Within the context of my new research, I co-founded the Africa off-Earth network (AOEN).