research & publications

Inscribed in both textual and visual practices, my engagement with anthropology and the study of Islam is anchored in both Middle Eastern studies and Southeast Asian studies. I use the power of moving images often denigrated as minor and mediocre to emulate alternative spaces of creation within cultural and media studies. My overall scholarly orientation offers to rethink flows of migration and cosmopolitanism as affective processes engendering history. I see in the practice of visual and digital anthropology the potential to foster an inviting humanistic theory in and with images.

For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen:  Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility [ongoing book project]

For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen:  Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility is an ethnography with Chams—Muslims in vastly Buddhist Cambodia—and among them Saeths—or Sayyids, descendants of the Prophet’s family. The book offers to bear witness to silenced histories and ethnographic refusals through reparative concealment. When manuscripts are burnt, objects buried, pictures faded, tombstones erased, records gone, and all things lost, all to tell, write and make see a history that cannot be, can we reciprocate through a seeing beyond what our eyes can see? By challenging regimes of hypervisibility (such as observations, archives, traces and all attempts to accumulate information by way of empirical documentation) Chams question the academic reliance on all things we attest to seeing, as we deploy proofs, data, facts. What Chams offer are practices of looking anchored in affect, multimodality and reciprocity, all embedded in the very invisibility of images. For This Cannot Be suggests to move away from standard obsessions for documentation. The book guides the reader into an open resonance that might demand to let go of observations, archives and traces. Instead, it ponders fabulation, speculation and a certain leap of faith to reach an indeterminate gathering, a way of being together without clear terms, a potential true co-presence. For This Cannot Be is a book that gets us to rethink history, not as an extraction of facts, and anthropology not as an accumulation of observations, but rather as opportunities to foreground resonance with others as well as within ourselves.

other publications and multimodal projects

I have made public my academic publications in the “reading room” located at the bottom of this page. If you are interested in my multimodal work, you can check my portfolio here and learn all about my current and past projects in still photography, film, sound, graphic ethnography and curation.  

If you have questions, want to drop a note or brainstorm a potential collaboration, please get in touch, I’d love to hear from you!