Current Project
2025 - to date
During my fellowship as the Germaine Tillion Chair at IMÉRA / Région Sud (2025–2026), I adopt a heritage ecology framework to examine how the contested realities of the Anthropocene shape heritage production and inform political claims about the past and future. Focusing on imaginaries of natural and cultural heritage—particularly in relation to renewable energy development and wetland conservation policies— I investigate how heritage is mobilized to legitimize, resist, or reshape political and ecological futures, critically engaging with the contradictions of “green” transitions. By addressing urgent issues such as climate change, political participation, and shifting social dynamics, the broader project seeks to reimagine wetland heritage in the Mediterranean as a critical site for exploring the emerging complexities of social and environmental justice, calling for new ways of imagining wetland heritage in the Anthropocene.
Past Projects
2023 - 2024
Funded by the British Academy in partnership with the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, this project brought heritage ecology into conversation with social and environmental justice to expand intangible cultural heritage (ICH) debates. I examined how intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is becoming a flashpoint in debates over whose rights and values are prioritised—those of heritage preservation, or those of ecological care. The project was grounded in ethnographic research with Mediterranean basket-makers who harvest wetland plants for their craft. These artisans consider themselves caretakers of the lagoons, yet their practices are increasingly endangered by climate change and coastal erosion. By foregrounding social, political and more-than-human relations, the project challenged conventional binaries between heritage safeguarding and environmental protection.
2019 - 2021
This project, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, is grounded in ethnographic and archival research at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin. Spanning 19th-century wax figure displays, Nazi-era acquisitions, Cold War exhibitions in East and West Berlin, and institutional transformations following German reunification, it traces the shifting life of the museum and its collections across successive political regimes. Through this historical arc, the project explores how a European ethnographic collection has been shaped by—and continues to respond to—entangled legacies of empire, fascism, socialism, and post-Cold War reordering.
The project reimagines museums as weaving devices, dynamic, relational machines —knotting together people, objects, histories, and more-than-human worlds in shifting entanglements. To view the museum as a weaving device is to recognize its inherent motion—never settled, always reconfiguring. The textures it produces—from erasure and extraction to care and safeguarding—are woven not only into the collections themselves, but into the very fabric of the institution. In this framework, the loom becomes more than a metaphor of continuity; it signals the frictions, ruptures, and ongoing efforts to unbind, rebind, and repair. Weaving, both as method and metaphor, foregrounds entanglement—the understanding that threads cannot be followed without sometimes unraveling the whole. Like any form of craft, it entails acts of creation and undoing, care and violence.
The project introduces the concept of prefigurative collection development—a curatorial approach that unsettles extractive legacies and opens space for more situated, inclusive, and forward-looking storytelling. Museums are reimagined as devices of possibility—lively, improvisational, open ended with the potential to craft reparative futures.
2016 - 2019
This postdoctoral project, funded by Keri Facer’s AHRC Connected Communities programme, critically examined the “learning city”. Based on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, it focused on informal and non-formal learning sites—such as community centres, mental health support groups, and contested heritage campaign—at the margins of a UNESCO Learning City. I examined how these grassroots initiatives resist, reinforce, or reconfigure the material politics of the formal learning city—from neoliberal educational governance to postcolonial memory struggles—and how they create space for new forms of knowledge. It showed that learning emerges within material, affective, and discursive infrastructures, demonstrating the fundamental role of care.
2010 - 2015
My PhD, funded by the AHRC, critically examined the Horniman Museum’s Romanian “folk art” collection — a term that flattens complex rural material culture into an ahistorical, depoliticised category — through the lens of critical heritage studies and museum anthropology. The research traced the collection’s history through the events leading to its acquisition. Examining the objects’ journey from socialist Romania to London, I revealed their strategic role in Cold War cultural diplomacy, where exhibiting and gifting collections across the Iron Curtain served as a performance of the socialist imaginary and a tool of state-making.
I also traced the collection through ethnographic research in Romania, exploring how the meanings attached to the objects have shifted in response to sociopolitical transformations - shedding light on local understandings of history, modernity, labor, heritage, gender, and personhood. This reframing of ‘folk art’ as a critical site for material culture studies allowed me to trace the historical and current social, economic, and political forces that shape the significance and uses of these artefacts.