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Department of Social Anthropology

 

Biography

I am a sociocultural anthropologist interested in ethics, New Age spiritualities, femininity, and digital social life. I submitted my PhD thesis in 2023. Before coming to Cambridge, I completed an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, an M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University (NYU), and a B.A. in Political Science with a focus on Middle Eastern History and Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). My first long-term fieldwork experience was with an all-female Sufi group in Damascus, Syria, enabled by a Fulbright grant. I also studied classical and Modern Standard Arabic at the University of Damascus and at the American University of Beirut, and attained near-native fluency in Levantine Colloquial Arabic. I have long-term living, research, and teaching experience in the Levant (Syria and Lebanon) and Pakistan. These experiences continue to inform my research interests and approaches, with a long-term aim of linking my current research with broader, cross-cultural comparative anthropological research.  

Research

My doctoral research at Cambridge combined the anthropology of ethics and digital anthropology through a focused study on the lived practices of a large, geographically dispersed group of women and their discursive, ethical pedagogical training in their shared, online worlds, in service of the formation of cultivated, offline, idealized selves. The project was initially conceived in order to understand the desire for an appeal of a normative kinship model amongst women who identify as either living in the West and/or subscribing to Western notions of companionate marriage, and to compare and contrast this with self-consciously “traditional” projects of self-cultivation, such as the women’s Islamic piety movement influentially documented by Saba Mahmood. One of the most enjoyable parts of my doctoral work was applying classical anthropological concepts from the discipline’s ethnographic record toward these digital phenomena, discovering, for example, similarities between certain forms of indigenous personhood and the ways in which that personhood is now enacted in the current interplay between on and offline selves. My prior training at the University of Oxford, especially in conjunction with the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has made me well placed to locate these conceptual connections and has inspired a commitment to thinking about comparison as method. 

 

Anthropologically, my research commented on the persistent desire for normative kinship models with ideals of romantic love, the ethical self-fashioning this entails, and the personhoods enacted in order to bring about the desired state of being. Because this self-fashioning is foregrounded by a re-imagined religious discourse done through and by a digital medium, it brought the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of ethics in conversation with digital anthropology in unexplored ways. 

 

My current research is two-fold. Firstly, I am focused on further developing digital ethnographic methods, leading to the publication of a theoretically and ethnographically informed methods handbook useful for students and those beginning digital ethnographic projects. Secondly, I am interested in tracing the conceptual and historical formation of New Age spiritualities, viewing them as informed by orthodox Eastern religious traditions and Western psycho-therapeutic self-help discourses. I conceive of this formation as an initial, historical flow of knowledge from East to West, decentering the West as theoretical locus, and later as an ethical encounter, enabling a conception of the flow and transmission of knowledge as multi-directional and mutually constitutive.

Research interests

ethics; digital social life; anthropology of religion; anthropology of Islam; New Age spiritualities; femininity; kinship

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles:
"Avatar, Personified: Split Personhood on an Ethical Online Support Group." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (forthcoming)
 2017. "Boys Will Be Boys So Girls Will Be Girls" The Resurgence of Femininity Among Single Women." Advances in Gender Research, 24: 93-113
Other publications: 

Talks Given

2019.  Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG) Ethics Panel I, Oxford, UK

2022.  Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG) "Ehtical Life as Virtual Reality" Oxford, UK 

Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate
Affiliated Lecturer
Office hours: appointment by email

Contact Details

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