Research Projects
Across the projects I describe below, I work as a futures anthropologist and multimodal researcher to understand how our worlds are changing – in healthcare, AI, humanitarian aid, refugee care, food, climate, and more intimate domains such human and nonhuman relationships. I pay particular attention to what is gained and lost in digital and material transformations, which inequalities and blind spots they create or deepen, and whose knowledge counts when we imagine the future. Much of my work is done with people and communities who are rarely heard in academic debates – including refugees, Indigenous knowledge keepers, slum dwellers, clinicians, young people, and nonhuman beings – and is grounded in co‑creative, often artistic forms of inquiry that aim to open up science and make it more inclusive, humble, and imaginative.
2025-2027: Healthy Futures: The Effects of Invisible Support in Refugee Care for Intergenerational Health
This project explores how “invisible” forms of support in European refugee reception centres shape the health and futures of pregnant women, their unborn children, and their broader communities. We study not only the everyday practices of care by staff and volunteers – the small gestures, words, and relational work that can reduce stress and interrupt intergenerational cycles of vulnerability – but also how these practices are (mis)represented in formal Monitoring & Evaluation systems. While M&E reports circulate in digital spaces as evidence of what refugee care looks like, they often fail to capture the lived realities of support on the ground. By comparing digital accountability infrastructures with embodied practices of care, we ask whose efforts are recognised, whose are not, and how a more attentive understanding of care can contribute to healthier futures. I am the Principal Investigator of this project and conduct this research together with Professor Tessa Roseboom, Professor of Early Development and Health at the University of Amsterdam and Future Generations Commissioner at Amsterdam UMC, our Postdoctoral Researchers Marjette Koot and Loes Loning, and refugee- and maternal health organizations Because We Carry and Amurtel. Read more about the project and team here.
2025-2026: Public debates, everyday injustice, and AI in the global South
Together with Dr Nafis Hasan (University of Amsterdam), Dr Sagnik Dutta (Tilburg University), and Siddhart D’Souza (University of Warwick), this project examines how artificial intelligence is discussed, regulated, and resisted in different parts of the Global South. Through roundtables and co‑authored work with practitioners and scholars, we explore the gaps between public debate, legal frameworks, and the everyday injustices experienced by those who live and work with AI systems. We are particularly interested in whose voices and forms of expertise are taken seriously in these discussions, and how insights from the Global South can help reimagine fairer and more inclusive futures for AI governance. We are currently preparing a book proposal and Special Issue centered around the findings of our collaborative research.
2020-2028: The Future of Healthcare: Human–Algorithm Collaborations in Global Public Health
When people think of algorithmic decision‑making, they often picture software and datasets. In practice, every algorithmic decision in healthcare is the result of collaboration between humans and machines: programmers who design systems, clinicians who interpret outputs, managers who set targets, and patients who live with the consequences. This long‑term anthropological project, conducted in seven countries, investigates how doctors, data specialists, and algorithms jointly shape decisions in areas such as genetic research and preventive care. We look at what is gained and lost when healthcare becomes increasingly datafied and automated: how workloads shift, which skills are devalued or “deskilled,” which ethical issues remain hidden, and who benefits from these transformations in global public health. I am the Principal Investigator of this project and supervise Postdoctoral researcher Zongtian Guo and PhD students Albina Abzalova and Ismail Umar. In this endeavour I collaborate with Jeannette Pols, Professor in the Anthropology of Everyday Ethics. The project is supported by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. You can find more information about the project and the team here.
Digital technologies are often designed in and for Global Northern contexts, yet they increasingly shape everyday life far beyond those settings. In this project, co‑designed with Indigenous collaborators in the Brazilian Amazon, we study how local communities appropriate digital media and communication technologies in ways that both challenge and repurpose Western‑centred tools. We explore the limits they encounter when confronted with devices and algorithms that do not “fit” their worlds, as well as the creative potential that emerges when different epistemologies meet at the same interface. The project is grounded in collaborative ethnography: co‑producing analysis, co‑authoring outputs with Indigenous researchers, and jointly organising workshops in both Amazonian and European contexts. I am the Co-PI of this research and conduct this work together with Professor Paula Helm (Professor for Empirical Computational Ethics at Frankfurt am Main University), Dr Beatrice Bonami (postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, leading Planetary AI’s UKRI‑funded work package on AI & Materiality), and Professor Adriano Da Silva (Professor of AI & Linguistics at the Federal University of Amazonia). The project has been supported financially by a seed grant from Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and we are currently finalizing a book that was co-authored with Indigenous and local researchers.
2022-2024: Ethical AI: From Retrospective to Prospective Frameworks
This project takes the form of an invited think tank and roundtable series funded by the Free University Amsterdam (VU). Together with researchers from philosophy, law, social sciences, and technology studies – including Professors Jan Ruijgrok and Johan Wempe – we ask whether existing ethical frameworks are adequate for a world increasingly shaped by AI. Much of modern ethics is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of autonomous individuals who can be held accountable for their actions, leading to predominantly retrospective approaches that focus on assigning responsibility after harm occurs. AI systems, however, are collective, opaque, and often distributed across time and space. In this project, we explore how ethical thought might shift towards more prospective, relational, and systemic frameworks that better address the realities of algorithmic decision‑making. We meet regularly as an interdisciplinary group and each investigate, within our own fields, how AI exposes the limits of prevailing notions of responsibility and care.
2015-2020: The Future of Human Relationships
In this project, I explore how emerging technologies and social practices are transforming love, intimacy, and human relationships – and what these changes might mean for the future of our societies. Through a combination of literature research, interviews, and immersive anthropological fieldwork, I engaged with dating apps, sex robots, virtual relationships, polyamory, sologamy, and other less conventional forms of intimacy. Using my own body and everyday life as research instruments, I experimented with practices that are currently marginal but may become more widespread, asking: How do these new forms of loving and relating reshape our notions of commitment, gender, sexuality, and care? Whose desires and vulnerabilities are centred, whose are ignored, and what kinds of inequalities emerge as the future of intimacy takes shape? The findings of this research are presented, amongst others, in my book ‘With Six in A Bed’, which came out with Polity Press and was translated into several languages.
2016-2020: The Future of Conflict, Humanitarian Aid, and Refugee Care
As a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Dorothea Hilhorst, I co‑supervised four PhD projects and contributed to a large, multi‑country study on disasters and conflict. Our research focused on nine conflict‑affected countries where disasters occur, examining how the politicisation of disaster response reshapes legitimacy, power, and relationships between different governance actors. Within the team, my task was to develop methods for thinking about the future of humanitarian aid and refugee care: how changing conflict dynamics, funding structures, and local–international relations might transform what aid and protection look like, who controls them, and who is left out. The project combined critical analysis with scenario thinking and close collaboration with practitioners and was funded by a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) awarded to Professor Hilhorst. Read more about the project here.
2014-2017: The Future of Food and Animal Wellbeing
This project asks how our relationships with nonhuman animals might radically change in the coming generations, and what a more “post‑cruelty” future could look like. Drawing on historical research, interviews, and participant observation with activists, lawyers, lobbyists, farmers, inventors, vegan bodybuilders, influencers, and animal welfare advocates, I explored how norms around eating animals are shifting, and how quickly moral horizons can move once certain practices come into question. The project not only examines policy and technological innovation (such as alternative proteins), but also the cultural, emotional, and ethical transformations that occur when societies begin to see animals less as resources and more as sentient beings with whom we share a fragile planet. I describe the findings of my research in my book Once We Ate Animals, which was published in several languages and published internationally by Harper Collins. The research was also presented to a wide audience at the Lowlands festival, in a theater performance for which I wrote the script.
2008-2014: The Future of Climate Change
For many people in the Global North, climate change is still framed as a future threat. For others, it has already transformed daily life. In this project, I conducted long‑term anthropological fieldwork in places where climate change is experienced as an everyday reality: among Inuit communities in Greenland and in a flood‑prone informal settlement in Jakarta, Indonesia. In Greenland, I studied for 6 months how rapidly melting ice disrupts not only hunting livelihoods but also identities, gender roles, social relations and future aspirations. In Jakarta, I lived for over a year in a neighbourhood vulnerable to recurrent flooding, examining how residents navigate risk, citizenship, and state interventions in a rapidly changing megacity.
Across these sites, the project contrasts the knowledge and future visions of marginalised but highly affected groups – such as slum dwellers and Inuit hunters – with the ways urban planners, bureaucrats, politicians, and biological experts imagine and plan for climate futures. In doing so, it shows how climate governance often overlooks those who live with climate impacts most intensely, and how their perspectives could lead to very different ideas of what a just and liveable future entails. I published the findings of this research in academic articles, in my Master thesis (Free University, 2008), my PhD dissertation (defended in 2014, with honors), in an academic book called ‘Natural Hazards, Risk and Vulnerability’ (Routledge) and a more publicly accessible book that was published in Dutch (De Beste Plek ter Wereld) and Bahasa Indonesia (Tempat Terbaik di Dunia).