I am a senior lecturer in anthropology and convenor of the HDR programme at the ANU's School of Archaeology and Anthropology. My work spans from Australia to Europe and focuses on the often ambiguous ways people negotiate questions of belonging and alienation in an increasingly accelerated world. I received my PhD from Swinburne University in Melbourne in 2013. After graduating I spent eight years working in large-scale international research projects in Europe. From 2015 to 2019 I was the coordinator of a project based at the University of Bern and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation investigating the educational pathways of unaccompanied refugee youth.  Before joining the ANU in 2023, I was the CI of the independent Max Planck Research Group "Alpine Histories of Global Change", a prestigious research grant awarded by the Max Planck Society in Germany. As part of this project, I led a team of five researchers to investigate the socio-cultural genealogies of anti-cosmopolitan ideas and practices in the German-speaking Alpine region. 

PhD, Social Anthropology

Areas of Expertise: 

My research examines the ways people experience, negotiate and actively create place attachments in an age of rapid global transformations. It brings together the study of mobility and displacement with research on nativism and exclusionary political movements. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the actions people leap into to carve out a place in the world for themselves and the complicated social negotiation processes this involves.

In my previous research, I mainly did so by studying the placemaking practices of refugees amidst ambiguous and often hostile social environments. In the first monograph resulting from this research (Being-Here: Placemaking in a World of Movement, Berghahn 2018), I zoom in on the lifeworlds of Somali refugees in Melbourne to tease out the social practices they engage in to create a sense of belonging to place.

In my second book (Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth, Indiana University Press 2022), I accompany refugee youth from Eritrea and Guinea on their everyday pathways in Swiss educational settings to make visible the racialized socio-political processes whereby certain groups and individuals are made to feel out-of-place.

This engagement with the invisible, unspoken frontiers of belonging pervading liberal democratic societies has led to my on-going research, which can broadly be described as an investigation into the mushrooming of experiences and narratives of alienation. It looks at the placemaking practices of people living in rural strongholds of exclusionary political movements and traces the question of what happens when people who believe to possess the historical or “natural” right to call a place their own develop fears of losing their emplacement to newcomers. 

In the Max Planck Research Group I led from 2019-2023, I studied the everyday practices of the inhabitants of mountain communities in the Austrian Alps, to draw out the role of alienation in fuelling processes of societal fragmentation. This research resulted in a range of articles, a special issue as well as the volume Alpine Geschichten vom globalen Wandel (Alpine Histories of Global Change, Weger, 2024) - a visual essay book co-produced with two artists. Published in German, it is aimed at communicating our research findings to the rural communities we worked with. 

In my current research, I am zooming in on the politics of alienation: How certain humans, animals or plants are effortlessly accepted as belonging to a place, while others are marked as alien(-ating), dangerous or invasive. I do so by studying the tensions related to rewilding projects in two Alpine areas - Mount Kosciuszko in Australia and the Nock mountains in Austria.  Bringing together my research expertise in Australia and Europe, I am deploying a comparative lens to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ideas, fears and antagonisms propelling  engagements with rewilding policies in rural, agricultural communities.