Projects
Coexistence, Conflict and Calamity: Entangled Worlds of Hinduism and Islam in the Heart of India Ghent University
The resurgence of identity politics in India has deeply polarised public discourse between a fundamental clash of cultures and a liberal, pluralistic view of society. Behind the present deadlock is a long, complex history of encounters between Hindu and Muslim civilisations mediated by their monuments. In the 11th-12th centuries, the expanding frontiers of the Islamic world overlapped with the culturally-charged landscape of temple Hinduism, ...
Disaster Governance: Analyzing inconvenient realities and chances for resilience and sustainability KU Leuven
English summary
Disaster governance
Analyzing inconvenient realities and chances for resilience and sustainability
A social-ecological systems approach to disaster governance
In many places in the world, people are increasingly exposed to disasters. A few recent disasters illustrate the global magnitude of the problem: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the earthquake, tsunami and ...
A Thousand Knots KU Leuven
We are surrounded by traces of the past, a veritable garden of ghosts. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017. In my garden, colonial legacies reside in the hydrangeas and japonicas. They were originally brought back from Japan by Philipp Franz von Siebold who worked for the Dutch East India Company. An Acanthus mollis, whose leaves characterise Corinthian columns, continues to spread through a network of subterranean ...
Rewriting Anthropocene Aesthetics: A Rhetorical and Narratological Analysis of the Sublime in Contemporary U.S. Literature KU Leuven
The main goal of this project is to explore the rhetorical and aesthetic affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring modes of materiality and (non-)human agency in contemporary U.S. literature. Because the sublime has a particularly contested literary and cultural history in the USA, where the “American Sublime” has been entangled with problematic notions such as the wilderness, the frontier, and technology, this project offers close ...
The role of non-timber forest products in the sustainability of social-ecological systems: A critical analysis of selected case-studies in the Brazilian Cerrado KU Leuven
The Brazilian Cerrado is the second largest biome in South America. It occupies an area of 2,036,448 square kilometers – which corresponds to approximately 22% of the Brazilian territory – spanning over the states of Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí, Rondônia, Paraná, São Paulo and the Distrito Federal (www.mma.gov.br). It is one of the world´s biodiversity hotspots and is recognized as ...
The Sensory Ecology of Water: A Multisensory Anthropological Study of Outdoor Swimming in the Arctic KU Leuven
My project aims to re-think human-more-than-human interconnectedness by examining entangled relationships between arctic waters, the senses, and place. As a community of practice, outdoor swimming in Norway provides a unique lens through which to examine a sharing in the sensible grounded-in holistic planetary wellbeing. Following the global COVID-19 pandemic and wellbeing crisis, practitioners, tourism agencies, and popular media outlets ...
Voices of Materials:Probing the Cultural Ecology of Material Finitude. University of Antwerp
RAPID REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION – URBANISATION TOWARDS CIRCULARITY. SOFIA EU KU Leuven
Infrastructure networks developed in the 19th and 20th centuries continue to structure entire urban areas and hinterland territories at a macro level, but they become redundant or inadapted to the new “post-growth” challenges. A new strategic spatial framework is necessary, one which is based on the regions’ ecological and metabolic systems, ensures the environmental and economic resilience of a territory, allowing it to adapt to a wide range ...