Works in Progress
These are some of the research, public engagement and writing projects I am currently developing.
By Fmjwiki - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Projecting the Future
How can the development of large-scale infrastructure help us understand the emergence of new forms of governance as well as changing ideas and practices related to citizenship across Africa? In recent years the Kingdom of Morocco has embarked on a series of ambitious billion-euro projects to overhaul the country’s urban infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Seeking to position itself as Africa’s new regional and financial powerhouse, Morocco has also been funding and steering similar agendas across West Africa. As recent large popular protests framed in terms of access to (decaying) infrastructure and development have rocked the North African kingdom, the question of “why mega-projects now?” is more timely and salient than ever.
I am currently pursuing a second book project around these questions.
Un-Mapping the Postcolonial City - Experiments in [Remote] Radical Participatory Carto-Ethnography
A smaller side-project I am currently concerned with deals with anthropological questions around method. I’m looking to explore the possibilities for developing new methodological and epistemological avenues for conducting collaborative, radically participatory ethnographic research in postcolonial urban settings, using open-source, iterative digital technologies in a context of reduced access to people and physical locations.
How might experiments in remote, open-ended, playful and generative, user-sourced carto(ethno)graphies help to conceptually un-map the received wisdoms and inherited colonial logics that continue to shape and reproduce social difference and spatial fragmentation in our age of planetary urbanization?
Building New Commons in Climates of Inequality
We are living in a period of accelerating crises (environmental, epidemiological, financial) and disappearing commons. Spaces and forms of shared ownership and knowledge-making have been severely eroded over the course of the last century across Africa. We can see this in the decline and technocratic reshaping of historical institutions and forms of ‘traditional commons’ like communal irrigation and agricultural production systems, or the privatization and expropriation of collective lands to facilitate the building of new exclusive urban enclaves.
I am currently developing a research project around these themes that hopes to answer crucial and pressing questions about the unequal distribution of risk and resources as part of the recent ‘green turn’ in urban and infrastructural developments across North and West Africa.
Aftermaths and Afterlives of Modernism
A 2019 agenda of workshops and public debates about the political, cultural, and social dimensions of the Modernist movement in the MENA, organized by the Cultures and Global Aesthetics group at Leiden University. As a dynamic group of young scholars coming from diverse disciplines - including Cultural and Visual Anthropology, Cultural Analysis, Literary Studies, History, History of Art, Area Studies (North Africa, Middle East and South Asia), Urban Studies and Memory Studies - we share an interest in the intersections between politics and aesthetics as articulated in the Middle East and North Africa.