Educator, Multimodal ethnographer & artist, curator, and dance facilitator.
I am interested in diverse intellectual and expressive adventures, with a recurrent theme on the connections between music, dance, and "spiritual" connections, broadly defined.
"Contrasting the politics of self/other in ethnography." Guest talk at the "Ethno/Musicology in Action: Fieldwork and Ethnography" course at the University of Manchester on April 29, 2022.
I'm currently a Ph.D. researcher at the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. I am co-supervised by anthropologist of sound Rupert Cox and ethnomusicologist Caroline Bithell.
My Ph.D. is about the connection between listening practices to music and ecstatic experiences in modern, secular "spiritual" communities in Europe. I'm studying and practicing a type of conscious dance called Ecstatic Dance Through this work, I am exploring experimental and creative ethnographic research methodologies and mediation (technological, sensorial, conceptual) in spiritual experiences.
I previously did a 7-month ethnography at the Naqshbandi Sufi Center of Barcelona, Spain, as part of an MA in Anthropology in Ethnography co-supervised by visual and religious anthropologist Roger Canals and anthropologist of Islam Alberto Bargados (2018). In this study, I explored theories about space and approaches to spatial analyses of social practice in relation to sound and sonic behaviors of Islamic ethical subjectivity.
I did a Masters in Science and Technology Studies from Maastricht University in the Netherlands (2012) under the supervision of Bernike Pasveer, through which I learned about material semiotics and Actor-Network Theory. My academic career started with a Bachelor of Science in Public Policy from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, USA (2009), where I did a discursive analysis of the grammar of institutions from a philosophy of language perspective.