Current Project
2025 - to date
I am currently expanding the heritage ecology framework for anthropological research to examine how the contested realities of the Anthropocene shape constructions of heritage and inform political claims about the past and future. Focusing on imaginaries of both natural and cultural heritage (an artificial division per se), particularly in relation to renewable energy development and wetland conservation policies in Sardinia, I investigate how heritage is mobilised to legitimise, resist, or speculate on political and ecological futures, engaging critically with the contradictions of "green" transitions.
More broadly, this research seeks to reimagine Mediterranean wetland heritage as a critical and vital site for exploring the speculative and prefigurative dimensions of wetland 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 rethinking the vital and speculative dimensions of wetland heritage.
Past Projects
2023 - 2024
Funded by the British Academy in partnership with the dr. Yunci Cai, University of Leicester, this project brought heritage ecology into conversation with questions of social and environmental justice, expanding debates on intangible cultural heritage (ICH). It asked how ICH is becoming a flashpoint in struggles over whose rights, values and imaginaries of safeguarding, conservation and care are prioritised. The project was grounded in ethnographic research with Sardinian basket-makers who harvest wetland plants for their craft. They consider themselves caretakers of the lagoons, yet their practices are increasingly endangered by the effects of climate change and coastal erosion, as well as by shifting wetland management paradigms. Within this new uncertainty, I looked at how ICH might be understood as vital heritage, beyond the binaries of heritage safeguarding and 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, 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. 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. Museums are reimagined as devices of possibility - lively, improvisational, open ended with the potential to craft reparative futures. The project also 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.
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.