I research education, democracy, social justice, and belonging, with a particular interest in how institutions shape (and are shaped by) people's opportunities, experiences, and orientations toward the future. Across my work, I explore questions of power, knowledge, and representation, as well as how individuals challenge, negotiate, and transform institutional structures in everyday life. My research is informed by anthropology, feminist theory, critical race studies, and the anthropology of education.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Educational Optimism project, led by Laura Gilliam. The project explores how minoritised students navigate educational institutions, aspirations, and everyday experiences of belonging, opportunity, and inequality. I am particularly interested in institutional habituses, hidden curricula, and hope as an everyday practice, and in how young people experience education both as a pathway to opportunity and as a space shaped by inequalities, and possibilities for social change.
Previously, I completed a PhD on student activism and questions of social and epistemic justice in higher education in the United States. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the University of California, Berkeley, I examined how students, staff, and faculty members navigated a politically polarized environment. My research focused on negotiations over what forms of knowledge are granted legitimacy and how historical events are represented and interpreted.
I have taught a number of anthropological subjects, supervised undergraduate theses and fieldwork students.
At DPU, I have specifically taught the mandatory subjects "fieldwork and analysis", "engaging anthropology" and acted as a supervisor in "field design".
As a former external lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, I have taught and supervised a number of anthropological and related subjects at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
I am particularly interested in themes such as nationalism, political violence, activism, racialisation and gender. Previously I have conducted fieldwork in the UK on military remembrance practices and the construction of national unity and imaginaries. Further I have conducted fieldwork on community building in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina.
