After working for impact-evaluation organizations that use laboratory-like research approaches (such as randomized control trials) to frame socio-economic features of various "communities" and inform policy and practice in “natural resource management”, it became clear to me that in order to critically engage with the "realities" research creates - I needed to explore different rhetorics. ​Since 2016, I began this journey by walking, working and talking with pastoralists in Namibia, Oman, Iran, Tunisia, and Italy.

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The ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded my PhD research (2018-2022): “Partir pour Rester” – To Leave in Order to Stay in a community called Douiret, in the arid mountain-scapes of southern Tunisia. Here I explored how human mobility, which includes the role of “absence” (as a different way of being present), influences how people organize around livestock. Collective herding practices become integral to enabling human mobility and animal husbandry "at the margins" of commodified livestock markets. Within the PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) research cohort I began to experiment with film, photography and sound to expand notions of fieldwork and representations of different pastoral epistemics. 

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I am interested in arts-based research for collaborative and critical-action-research, developing citizen-led research, and fostering critical views on “development” - particularly in relation to pastoralism.

 

As a post-doctoral researcher for REPAiR - I am helping develop arts-based methods to bring together pastoralists, field-extension officers, film-makers, political ecologists/economists and environmental scientists to narrate "nature-based solutions" in Southern Africa's communally governed rangelands.

I am also independently developing a "poetry as research method" collective field manual in Tunisia. 

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