In collaboration with Greta Semplici, this project is a visual ethnography of pastoral scholars. Our aim is to contextualize and record shifting thoughts in pastoral studies in the last fifty years. To date 12 in-person interviews have been conducted and some of the material has been used in the free online course offered by the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) called "Pastoralism in Development".

How can you visually explain "different forms of absence"? With PASTRES, and the fundamental help of Roopa Gogineni (design), Hamdi Dallali (camera/interpretation) and Hiba Saidi (translation), I produced this visual storytelling document where I describe the role of migration, leaving and staying, and various forms of absence-presence on livestock-keeping in Douiret (southern Tunisia). I describe rituals of absence-presence, liminal, asynchronous, and virtual forms of absence-presence and the gendered dimensions of absences as vacuums where womens' roles and subjectivities in households and in society shift.

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This material was then distributed widely in French, English and Arabic in Douiret, and used to engage with second year BA Anthropology students at the University of Sousse (Tunisia) to discuss alternative ways of narrating research.

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Seeing Pastoralism

I am working on a commissioned storybord that visually explains the khlata, the act of mixing herds, as a commoning practice.

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Commons Library) Tunisia

Exploration of peasant oral heritage in representing liminality, and nondual seeing. 

Received mobility grant from the Goethe Institute. Collaborating partner is the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and Environment (OSAE)

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Poetry, maxims and riddles remain an important tool to convey sociopolitical landscapes - land, power, mobility, sovereignty, heritage. In the south of Tunisia, storytelling remains an important skill to transmit popular emotions, to describe leaving, staying, returning, places, relationships, conflict, and rural living. Poetry offers a medium to understand the affective, and practical aspects of absence-presence. In 2018, I began to work with Houcine Mseddek, a history professor from Ghomrassen, to collect and translate contemporary poetry from the Rbaya/Sekhrafi pastoralists in the plains, who have historically looked after the herds of their jbeili (mountain) counterparts in the Dahar. Sadly Houcine passed away suddenly during my research. In memory of Houcine this project has now developed to collate, translate and curate a slice of contemporary peasant orality in Tunisia with the objective of revealing the analytical power of oral heritage, in its contextualized interpretation.

The written and spoken oralities of pastoralists, oasis farmers, foragers, fishermen and beekeepers across Tunisia will be recorded, explained by the performer, and translated into French. The original poems will then be annotated with commentaries by a historian/sociologist, an agrarian political economist and a Sufi singer all from Tunisia.

As a researcher-curator my task will be to visually and graphically illustrate these different interpretations through a guide book that is pedagogically-relevant for fieldworkers, cultural practitioners, youth and artists.

In order for research to align with the contemporary empirics of pastoral settings, research methods first need to evolve to capture such new complexities. Researchers inevitably find themselves in-between different process of knowledge creation and settings. In-between for example, the academic parlance and the pastoral vernacular, in-between different modalities/timings/tempos/rythms and settings.

How can we manage such in-between states as researchers? How can we break free from dominant ways of representing and narrating pastoralism in academia?  How can experimentation in research, and an engagement with what Echi Gabbert calls "the anthropology of the senses", bring researchers closer to honouring silence in the field instead of questioning? What can this process bring to researchers, pastoralists, policy, practice and pastoral studies? 

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This personal exploration is inspired by a special issue I co-edited with the journal of Nomadic Peoples : Messy Research

How do we represent and understand (im)mobility? In 2019 I co-organized a three day writing workshop in Germany on this theme. This resulted in a network of scholars that later contributed to publishing articles in the special issue with Nomadic Peoples on Methodological Mess.

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(Im)mobilities

The objective is to map calling/herding sounds across the globe.