Research
My research attends to the social and political life of form, where "form" is the hinge between what is sensed and practices of "making sense." Across research on independent animation and mediated memory in Europe and on the poetics of reconciliation and climate-change denial in North America, I weave together close analysis of media-texts with ethnographic attention to their production and uptake. In recent projects, research creation methods—animation, field-sketching, and filmmaking—have become central to my own processes of sense-making.
Significant projects include: Unsettling Forms / Slippery Figures; Syn(aes)thetic Memory; Reconciliatory Poetics; and Parasites and Post-Truth Climate.
Unsettling Forms / Slippery Figures
This project draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with independent (auteur) animation filmmakers in Berlin. By attending closely to artists' practices, artworks, and uptake, I explore how they use animation's formal plasticity to evoke violent realities that seldom figure in official narratives of social belonging in Germany. I reconceptualize animation as both a semiotic process and a practice of relation that unsettles received categories and hierarchies of personhood, thereby recasting the terms of relation itself. The stakes of reanimating relationality sharpen amid pressure to take a legible stance within a besieged liberal humanist settlement—especially for artists whose own belonging is in question. Peer-reviewed publications include the Gumperz Prize-winning "Alienable gesture" (JLA 2025) and "Un-sitely mediations" (Semiotic Review 2024); an additional article has been submitted for publication and a book manuscript, Slippery Figures: Animating the Violence of Relation in Berlin and (not) Berlin, is in progress.
Similar Rubble
This project bridges my dissertation and postdoctoral research. It comprises a short film and essay, both of which move between hand-drawn animation, algorithmic vision, and archival photographs to explore the unsettling affinities between images of past and present violence, in Berlin and elsewhere. The film was screened at the 2025 AAA Meetings in New Orleans and will be screened in Vancouver at the Society for the Study of Affect Meeting in autumn 2026 (see "Art" for a synopsis and images; see "News" for upcoming screenings) and the essay has been submitted for peer-reviewed publication.
Syn(aes)thetic Memory
This ongoing project examines how artists and activists in Germany are using digital media, including AI, VR, and XR, to reanimate memories of displacement in the context of Germany's highly institutionalized yet increasingly fraught memory culture. I attend to projects unfolding within the dominant framework of Holocaust memorialization as well as projects that thematize post-colonial struggle, activism, and migration. Digitization, across these projects, is bound up with the questions: what does it mean to animate an archive of violence, who has the right to do so, and what is the status of the reanimated trace?
Reconciliatory Poetics
This project examines popular music-critical representations of Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit Canadian musician. In the article, "All there is: The reconciliatory poetics of a singing voice" (American Anthropologist 2018), I argue that such representations shore up a reconciliatory project by mobilizing voice ideologies within densely poetic texts. By analyzing how discourse on cultural production figures reconciliation at various scales, this research contributes to critical understandings of liberal multicultural politics of reconciliation and offers insight into an entanglement of voice, language, and media ideologies in popular journalistic discourse on cultural difference.
Parasites and Post-Truth Climate
This project investigates the semiotics of institutionalized climate-change skepticism. Findings were published in the article, "Parasites and post-truth climate" (JLA 2019), which argues that such actors attain persuasive power by striking up a parasitic relation to reputable climate science organizations and associated discourse genres. Drawing on theories of citationality and genre, it construes parasitism as an asymmetric structure of relation in which corporate climate change skeptics imitate and incorporate host institutions in order to mine scientific authority while generating noise within established channels of scientific communication.