After working in the business of "evidence-based research", "randomized control trials", and "impact evaluations" of development programmes in 2010, it became clear to me that in order to critically engage with the development realities that research narrates (and creates), I needed to explore a different rhetoric. This marked the beginning of a gradual shift for me from evaluation science to epistemological critique. The exploration of different ways to do research is still the driving force in my work, especially in an increasingly data-driven world. ​Since 2016, I began this journey by walking, working and talking with pastoralists first in Namibia and then Oman, Iran, Tunisia, France and Italy.​​

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The ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded my doctoral research (2018-2022). “Partir pour Rester” , To Leave in Order to Stay, where I looked at how human mobility and migration projects, affects how extended families and herders organise around livestock in Douiret, a mountainous village in southern Tunisia. Collective herding practices became an integral inspiration to my research. During this time I was also a member of the PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) research cohort, where I began to experiment with film as both method and medium to expand representations of pastoral epistemics.

 

I am interested in how dominant environmental regimes (carbon markets, nature-based solutions, neoliberal environmentalism) and development regimes (touristification and heritagization) reframe, translate, represent, contest, or transform systems of knowing, animal husbandry and landscapes.

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I like to use sound, film, photography, poetry and comics for collaborative, critical-action-research focussing on animal husbandry, especially in drylands, high-altitude mountains, and islands. ​

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As a post-doctoral researcher for REPAiR - I am working on a year-long initiative on "rangeland myths". exploring how new discourses on rangeland governance repurpose old myths, and reshape what counts as valuable ecological knowledge on rangelands and for animal husbandry.

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I am involved in several side-projects including co-coordinating the pastoralism and carbon working group as part of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralism, designing an itinerant film-club that focuses on pastoralism across the globe, and instituting a female collective of researchers-activists-practitioners working with livestock and pastoralists.