Current Project
2025 - to date
I am currently extending debates on heritage ecology in anthropology to examine how the contested realities of the Anthropocene shape constructions of heritage and inform political claims about the past and the future. My focus is on imaginaries of natural and cultural heritage (itself an artificial division), particularly in relation to renewable energy development and wetland conservation policy in the Mediterranean. I investigate how heritage is mobilised to legitimise, resist or speculate on political and ecological futures, engaging critically with the contradictions of Europe’s “green” transition.
More broadly, this research seeks to reimagine Mediterranean wetlands as vital sites for exploring the speculative and prefigurative dimensions of heritage. The project has been awarded the South Region/Iméra Germaine Tillion Chair, “The Mediterranean, Tomorrow” (TBC). Together with Weaving Heritage Ecologies, it will inform my next monograph, currently in preparation.
Past Projects
2023 - 2024
Funded by the British Academy and conducted in partnership with Dr Yunci Cai of the University of Leicester, this project brought heritage ecology into conversation with questions of social and environmental justice. It asked how ICH (intangible cultural heritage) was becoming a flashpoint in struggles over whose rights, values and imaginaries of safeguarding, conservation and care are prioritised. The project was grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in Sardinia, where heritage protection sits uneasily alongside paradigms of wetland management and nature conservation at a time of climate change and coastal erosion. Amid this growing uncertainty, I explored how ICH might be understood as vital heritage, moving beyond the binary of heritage safeguarding versus environmental protection. The project culminates in a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies, titled “Frontiers and Boundaries of Intangible Heritage and Justice”, forthcoming in 2027.
2019 - 2021
This project, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, was 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 the institutional transformations that followed German reunification, it traced the shifting life of the museum and its collections. Through this historical arc, the project explored how a European ethnographic collection had been shaped by, and continued to respond to, the entangled legacies of empire, fascism, socialism and post-Cold War reordering.
The project reimagined museums as weaving devices, or dynamic, relational machines that knot together people, objects, histories and more-than-human worlds in shifting entanglements. In this view, museums became devices of possibility, lively, improvisational and open-ended, with the potential to craft reparative futures. The project also introduced the concept of prefigurative collection development, a curatorial approach that sought to unsettle the museum’s extractive legacies and, perhaps, to open space for more situated, inclusive and future-proofed storytelling with historical collections of everyday material culture.
2016 - 2019
My postdoctoral project, funded by AHRC’s Connected Communities, critically examined the idea of the “learning city”. Based on fieldwork in Bristol, it focused on informal and non-formal learning sites at the margins of a UNESCO, such as community centres, mental health support groups, and contested heritage campaigns. I examined how these grassroots initiatives resist, reinforce, or reconfigure the material politics of the official learning city, and how they create space for new forms of knowledge. The project showed that learning is embedded in material, affective, and discursive infrastructures, and foregrounded care as central to how knowledge is produced and sustained.
I also curated the Learning City: A Self-Portrait exhibition at Hamilton House, Bristol. This interactive display was assembled from ethnographic and participatory research. Photographs, film, drawings, personal stories, craft objects and artefacts were brought together to explore how spaces, people and things sustain learning in the city. Contributions came from a wide range of initiatives and community groups which were part of my ethnographic fieldwork in the city, including Barton Hill Settlement, Countering Colston, Dhek Bhal, Easton Community Centre, Rainbow Project, Refugee Women of Bristol, St Mungo’s, Windmill Hill City Farm, the Workers’ Educational Association and Wild Walks to Wellbeing.
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 provenance through the events leading to its acquisition. Following 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 back to Romania through ethnographic fieldwork, 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 exploring questions of politics and everyday life in material culture studies allowed me to examine the historical and contemporary economic and sociopolitical forces that shape the uses, meanings and diminishing significance of these artefacts in exhibition context.
Finally, with Gabriela Nicolescu and Alexandra Urdea, I curated an exhibition at the Constance Howard Gallery in London. Drawing on the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and the Lloyd Collection of East European materials, we brought anthropologists and artists together to turn the gallery into a laboratory for experimenting with “folklore.” Our shared aim was to rethink the archive as both an open resource and a site of contestation, and to question the value invested in folk objects by working directly with their textures and patterns. Visitors could follow three paths through the gallery. The first drew on photographic details from the archive, inviting viewers to imagine how it might be reassembled. The second introduced objects that sat in tension with the archive itself. The third, developed by artists at Goldsmiths, took the folk pattern as a springboard for creativity and forgery.