About Me.

"If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes." –– Agnes Varda 

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If you opened me up, you would find pine forests carpeted by blueberry bushes from the island Öland in the Baltic, materially diverse lakes encapsulated in Stockholms archipelago, teeming with life in the form of seaweed, fish, dragonflies, waterlilies, and moss on the rocks I took off from when jumping in. You would also find the inner city streets of Stockholm, Sweden, white hilltop town views of Vejer, Cádiz, Spain, deep noisy sticky jungle of Lambusango, Sulawesi, Indonesia, and iron-red soils of Sagalla, Tsavo, Kenya. 

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In some of these landscapes I grew up, and others called me to them. They all are constitutive of who I am and how I fit into my life and work. I often do not distinguish between "about me" and "about my work". It all simmers in the same cauldron.

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I chronically resist specialising and it is in the interstices and intersections and connective tissue of "disciplines" that I find most profound truths to reveal themselves. For example, I never could choose between literature and genetics, nor philosophy and ecology, nor political science and languages. I felt they all lost something important of their own essences by being separated from the others. And I still believe that to be true.

 

From plenty of field-based conservation volunteering, study, and research (through organisations like Operation Wallacea and Save the Elephants, and an BSc (Hons) in Animal & Conservation Biology) I zoomed out to do a Masters of Philosophy in Anthropocene Studies. This concept of the Anthropocene – however contested – enabled a stringing-together of ecology and emotion, of politics and climate justice, of economy and literature, of science, arts, humanities. In some ways, it is a "theory of everything" that dissolves concepts of time, place, individual, collective, cause, effect, while being seemingly impossible to summarise concisely (I am always trying). 

 

By formal training I am a researcher. But there are more ways of learning than formal education. I deeply challenge the epistemic hegemony of Western scientific knowledge production. It is incredible in many ways, and it falls short in others. This exclusion of diverse ways of knowing is at the centre of my concern. 

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I currently live in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I am researching eco-somatics, particularly the significance of the body as a site of liberation from oppressive systems of inhabiting the Earth – liberation that includes the human and the more-than-human. This combines sensory experience, inter-material dialogue, recognition of more-than-human and human agency, (co-)creativity, and outward expression and action. It is also anchored in understandings of inevitable vulnerability, and surrender to corporeal realities that often are delusionally ignored in contemporary life. 

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I love water. I love breathing. I love dogs. I love walking and people watching. I love learning. Books and movies are doorways. I am always excited to work collaboratively and co-creatively. Artistic expression is a natural language, and I am currently chipping away at the blockages that make me feel I have forgotten it, somehow.