I am interested in how racism or perceptions of ethnic relations affect how these social systems are constructed, how people align to, or oppose, these systems, and how we can find out if there are alternative or hopeful futures.
I have used ethnographic methods to follow how people work in different industries, such as seasonal agricultural work, the tech industry and logistics. This has mainly concerned migrant workers or people who are seen as “exceptions” in a national labour market. Among other things, I have critically reflected on what “logistics” actually means for technological development and for the value of the circulation of people and goods. This conceptualisation of logistics has enabled me to understand the spatial, e.g. places and landscapes, which are coded in specific ways, where routes and stops, or storage, are calculated in terms of costs and efficiency. Examples of this range from conflicting political perceptions of temporary migrant workers, to refugee dispersal systems, new technologies that facilitate migration management and, more recently, to social and economic structures that determine the transformation of cities and local communities into logistics hubs.
I have also been interested in exploring and mediating alternative knowledge production within academic research. Among other things, by drawing on feminist methods I have emphasized that migrants’ experiences and knowledge of society are important for understanding how, for example, local communities can create new caring or convivial cultures when the state withdraws. I also explore methods for making visible the significance of digital surveillance systems, or the transformation of our landscapes through investments in logistics infrastructures, in the context of people expressing that these changes feel far removed from their everyday lives.
