University of Sydney

Faculty Member, Anthropology

About

I am an anthropologist - trained in Australia (ANU), fieldwork in Laos, lecturer at The University of Sydney, and Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. I research everyday politics and economy. I have previously written about the politics of poverty, resource contestation, and the implications of aspirations, among other topics (a selection of previous publications are available on this website under "papers").

I am currently an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellow. My project investigates desire in the political field in Laos. In this work, I seek to understand how decisions about scarce resources are made and contested in Laos by following one policy, the "culture village" policy, from the village level through to Vientiane. I am interested in the moralities, strategies and judgements applied in such everyday engagements with politics, economy and the culture concept. My theoretical approach is focused on desire. I am inspired by the critical intersection between psychoanalytic, Deleuzian and ethnographic formulations of this concept. My aim is to produce a political ethnography of Laos and new tools for understanding desire in politics and economy.

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