Biography

I am a political geographer with a keen interest in the governance of human-environment relations, landscapes, and above- and below-ground infrastructure. In my current research, I am working on the politics of nuclear waste governance in Switzerland and beyond. Based on ethnographic research since 2019, I have been investigating the relationship between science, society, and democracy and how it is negotiated in a participatory governance process around issues of uncertainty, risk, and safety. In parallel, I have focused on the production of knowledge about the deep geological subsurface - where nuclear waste is to be stored for the next million years - and how it is articulated and contested in public controversies as the governance process progresses. This latter interest continues to be the focus of my SNSF Project (2024-2028) entitled "Nuclear Strata: The Political Geology of Nuclear Waste Governance", hosted by the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg. Overall, my work is empirically grounded and theoretically inspired by debates and concepts in political geography, political geology, political ecology, political anthropology, science and technology studies, philosophy of science, critical sustainability studies, and environmental humanities. In addition, I have been involved in a number of collaborative arts and science projects, including the Unruly Natures project at the University of St. Gallen.

Research and publications

• Publication and Works
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• Research Projects

  Nuclear Strata: The Political Geology of Nuclear Waste Governance (2023-present). This project scrutinizes the way nuclear waste governance reconfigures the relation between humans and the geological underground in Switzerland, Sweden and Germany. 

  Unruly Natures (2020-present) is a transdisciplinary research project on “earth-beings”. The project opens up space for unsettling neoliberal ecologies and reimagining ecological politics. 

  Governance of Risk and Sustainability (2019-present). This project studies nuclear waste governance in Switzerland, focusing particularly on the politics of risk, safety and sustainability.

  State Formation and the Politics of Infrastructure (2011-2017). This research project analyzes the interrelation between processes of state formation and the formation of landscapes and infrastructures in rural and urban Ethiopia.

Teaching and courses

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