As a scholar who integrates environmental anthropology with political ecology, I am interested in how humans and non-humans enter and exit social relationships with one another, and how their meanings and practices of mutual care change along the way. Crucial to my thinking is how broader dynamics of power are reproduced or renegotiated through human–nature interactions, as well as how particular discourses are materialized through practices in the everyday life. I combine digital with non-digital ethnographic methodologies and focus primarily on beings on the move, particularly in Japan.
My work reflects a trans-disciplinary approach grounded in the believe that ecological care practices cannot be understood apart from the affective worlds and their politics that sustain them. My doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Miyako Islands of Okinawa Prefecture, examined how urban-to-rural migrants’ relationships of care with animals, plants, and the ocean reshape their understandings of themselves and their surroundings, while simultaneously becoming sites through which broader asymmetries between Okinawa and mainland Japan are reproduced and renegotiated.
I graduated from Freie Universität Berlin with a PhD in Japanese Studies in 2026, following an MA and BA in Japanese Studies from Ghent University. I also hold a degree in Fine Arts from ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem. I am currently developing a postdoctoral research project and working on several peer-reviewed articles.