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About 

Hello! I am a multimodal anthropologist and image-maker with a foot in history.

Since the early 2000’s I have been living and working with Cham (Cambodian Muslims) Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) as they journey into Shi’a and into Iran. I follow history as an affective process refracted in images that allow for silences and absences to resonate with us. As a videographer/photographer within a team of wedding photographers and arrangers, and a professional curious attentive to the family photographic albums and selfies, I trace a sense for historiography that goes beyond an attachment to traces, observations and archives. Attending to images holding on to us between two pictures, images moving us long after moving on, I take 'looking' as a process wired in image-thought which destabilzes binary modes of thinking. My anthropological approach brings theory and practice together by way of experimentation using creative writing, still and moving images, analog and digital attempts and failures. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The American University in Cairo, where I teach visual, digital, and sonic anthropology, history & memory.

 

News ~ ~ ~

  • Following our CoMMPCT Sound Politics Event we are now calling for Beats & Bites for our upcoming collaborative playlists aiming audio thinkers and makers with an anthro bending! All info on the CoMMPCT website. Deadline April 7th!

  • I will be joining the 25th edition of this well loved film festival as a jury member for the documentary competition. Come watch your load of good docs, shorts and animation if you are in Egypt!

  • Attending AAA 2023 in Toronto? Join partner in crime Nat Nesvaderani and I and some fantastic fellow sonic ethnographers for our roundtable Soundscape as Feminist Homework. And make sure to attend our CoMMPCT [The Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers] launch event to brainstorm multimodal approaches with old and new friends!

  • The beautiful Routledge Handbook of Material Religion, generously put together by Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Jennifer Scheper Hughes, and S. Brent Rodríguez-Plateis out! Thrilled to see, amidst such a fantastically rich lineup, my own contribution on the im/materiality of history “Of Manuscripts That Can’t Be Read and Roads That Can’t Be Seen: Historical Matters among Chams in Cambodia“.

  • Check it out, along 80 other ethnographically grounded, speculative oriented and experimentally gifted other films!

    https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/

  • This roundtable takes David MacDougall’s 1995 essay Subtitling Ethnographic Films as an opening for our conversation. We wonder: How do we create a “shadowing of meanings” (ibid) when we inscribe subtitles or when we refuse to subtitle ethnographic films?

    Join Diana Allan, Nat Nesvaderani, Darcie DiAngelo, Rebekah Cupitt and I Wednesday March 8, 4.30pm GMT or catch the replay and the most multimodal centric anthro conference here:
    https://raifilm.org.uk/online-conference-visual-anthropology-and-speculative-futures/