I am an Assistant Professor at Leiden University's Institute for Area Studies: School of Asian Studies, where I coordinate and lecture in a variety of theoretical and methodological courses at BA, MA and PhD level. My research benefits from critical feminist ethnography and storytelling methodologies. Most of the topics I have researched and supervised are interdisciplinary, cross-regional and cross-cultural. I am interested in the intellectual legacy of maritime and island encounters, environmental colonialism, contemporary (non-positivist) notions of sustainability, the political ecology of waste and crisis, and ideas that offer critical perspectives to environmental topics and problematic. More recently, I have critically engaged with the impact of ecological racism on everyday life: from food relations to waste dependencies. Positionality and reflexivity are central to my research and teaching. As part of the Heritage & Environment branch of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development, I will look at the afterlives of seaweed fields as natural heritage, and as they transform and transverse island and maritime power relations. The focus of this line of inquiry will be ecofeminism as everyday resistance against the ‘beautifying’ of natural heritage sites.’
