I am an anthropologist studying prefiguration, sociality and emerging ethics as people negotiate access to shifting urban infrastructures, housing finance and engage in emerging politics and performance. I am currently a McArthur Research Fellow in Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in both rural and urban Mongolia has formed the bedrock of my research. I have published on anthropologies of capitalism/s, morality, causality, dwelling, sociality, environmental stigma and financialisation. My current research explores how lower-mid income residents in Ulaanbaatar shape the city through dwelling, owning and circulations of debt between kin and acquaintances when buying housing, and how they negotiate uncertain infrastructural atmospheres and relations of power. Part of this research appears in my 2020 monograph Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia – Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux published with UCL Press. My previous research in rural west Mongolia is on the intersubjective experience of performance and social aesthetics as people attempt to bring good futures into being in the face of environmental and economic uncertainty.
Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 2019, I worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate for four years at University College London (UCL) – Anthropology, and subsequently as a Teaching Fellow in Social Anthropology in the same department, where I taught on the anthropology of capitalism, the anthropology of nationalism, ethnicity and race, and on political and economic anthropology. I obtained my PhD from the Australian National University in 2014.
