I am an economic anthropologist with an interest in how the future figures in human practice. My research pioneers an ethnographic analysis of future making as a political, material, and affective endeavour central to contemporary capitalism. I have carried out a number of significant research projects working both independently and in interdisciplinary teams. As an experienced field researcher, I use a qualitative and mixed-methods toolkit including ethnography, interviewing, life history analysis, extended case studies, institutional histories, and archival research. I have also worked as consultant researcher for a number of third sector and corporate organisations. I was a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2012-13), Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University (2012-14), Visiting Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (2015), and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, New York (2016).   

Focused on Europe and West Africa, my research has explored how future imaginations and associated ethical orientations towards likely and unlikely things to come play out in techno-governmental practices and the cultural and material worlds shaped by them. My first book, Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany (2010), examines the rapid remake of Berlin through the lens of city planning, following the fall of state socialism. It shows how urban futures are conjured by planning agencies, independent experts, and citizen activists, and in the lived realities of its inhabitants. The focus is the controversy around Alexanderplatz, a public square and showcase of socialist urban infrastructure in East Berlin, including the agonistic relations of expertise, democratic participation, and civic belonging from which place can be reimagined. I expanded on the insights of this research in a productive collaboration with Simone Abram, resulting in the edited volume Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World (2013), which theorises how planning negotiates future material possibilities. 

I am now writing a second monograph with the working title A Doubtful Hope: Oil, Wealth, and Time in Atlantic Africa. Using long-term ethnographic as well as archival methods, I track the speculative logics at play in offshore hydrocarbon exploration in São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea. I show how oil has been conjured as a matter of ambiguous potentiality, both generative and destructive. This is underpinned by hopes of socio-economic change resulting from contingent articulations of colonial and postcolonial development imaginaries in this former plantation economy. My work examines the new and deeply racialised politics of resource management that, over the last decade, has emerged in contexts of the global oil industry and its governance by state and transnational institutions. It is a politics that revolves not simply around the democratic and technical aspects of oil’s exploitation but increasingly the affective dissonances associated with it.   

I build on my interest in the multiple and occasionally inconsistent temporalities of hydrocarbon extraction in a new UKRI-funded project entitled Fraying ties? Networks, territory and transformation in the UK oil sector (with Gavin Bridge, Durham University; Nana de Graaff, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; and James Marriott, Platform). This interdisciplinary collaboration will assess the current transformation and reassembly of the UK oil and gas sector shaped by public concerns about peak oil and the climate crisis, changing forms of regulation and expertise around the energy transition, and changes in the practices of industry and global hydrocarbon markets. You can find some of our early reflections on the future of North Sea oil here.  

I am keen to attract PhD students who want to develop ethnographically and theoretically compelling projects on resource extraction and energy, the regulatory, financial, and affective aspects of capitalist economies, state planning and urban development, and (post)plantation economies in the Global North and South. Past and present PhD students have examined community expectations as well as global networks of market making in extractive contexts (Kari Dahlgren, Doris Okenwa, Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa); gendered ethics of labour, work, and unemployment (Connor Watt, Eman Shehata); state policy and civil society mobilisation around climate crisis and energy transitions (Gabriela Cabaña Alvear, Catherine Whittle); and water infrastructures and their associated forms of hydrosociality (Marco del Gallo di Roccagiovine). If you are interested in pursuing research supervised by me, please, get in touch, sending a CV and a brief outline initially.