Much of my research has been grounded in long-term ethnographic, museum, and archival fieldwork in Romania and the UK, and more recently in Italy, Germany, and Poland. I approach Eastern and Southern Europe as critical vantage points from which to challenge dominant narratives of Europe, expose complex historical entanglements, and open up room for imagining alternative possibilities.
Focusing on museum collections, curatorial practices, and heritage ecologies, I am interested in how memory and the past are socially and politically mobilised and reimagined. I am especially drawn to the many forms such engagement with the past can take — from state-sanctioned, nationalist, and imperialist heritage projects, through activist interventions, to intimate practices of remembrance and care. I work closely with heritage institutions, social initiatives, collectives, artists, and activists to explore what this might look like on the ground. Ultimately, my work asks how knowledge might be co-created otherwise, and how the traces of the past might be worked with differently in the present and for the future.