About

I'm an anthropologist and artist. My research explores the social and political life of form, with a focus on aesthetics, citationality, and power.

In addition to linguistic and media anthropology, I build on semiotics, critical theory, film and media theory, and STS.

My scholarly work is in ongoing dialogue with my artistic practice and I approach research creation as a mode of anthropological inquiry—a way of thinking through sensuous form.

In my dissertation, Unsettling Forms: Animation, Alienation, and Violence in Berlin, I examine how artists use animation to unsettle dominant narratives around violence and belonging. Through two years of ethnography with Berlin-based filmmakers, I show how they animate fragments of language, images, and gesture in ways that render violence newly perceptible and reconfigure who can be seen and heard, and on what terms. I am developing this research into a book, Slippery Figures: Animating the Violence of Relation in Berlin and (not) Berlin, which centers on how animation allows my interlocutors to figure violence as relation's latent risk, rather than its other.

My ongoing ethnographic research, "Syn(aes)thetic Memory," examines how artists in Berlin are using digital media to reanimate memories of displacement in the context of Germany's highly institutionalized yet increasingly fraught memory culture. A fuller description of this project appears on my "Research" page.