Forschung

My research interests are founded in enduring political questions about the opportunities and limits of human connections and political power across distances. My interdisciplinary background merges thorough theoretical knowledge with my regional expertise in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, which has grounded former and current research topics and will continue to drive my future research projects.

I work at the intersection of Area Studies (Southeast Asia Studies in particular) and Sociology, connecting with other disciplines that are key to the study of belonging, migration and political identity, including Anthropology, Political Science, and Law. I employ a broadly critical approach to Area Studies scholarship, combining theoretical inquiry with empirical field research and grounded, qualitative methods. I have fostered academic engagements and personal ties with Indonesia since 1996. My research has also been informed by periods of extended fieldwork in Indonesia (more than 30 months in total), Malaysia, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the United States

My research interests are shaped by a concern for the injustices that characterise contemporary migration and border regimes, a desire to understand the political, social and legal factors that shape human mobility and transregional flows, and a commitment to scholarship that contributes to positive social change. My previous and current research interests span over five broadly inter-related areas of inquiry:

1. separatist movements and conflict transformation
2. diaspora politics and long-distance involvement in “home country” developments
3. forced mobility, transit migration and the search for durable protection 
4. people-smuggling and trafficking in persons
5. contemporary Indonesian politics

 

New and upcoming research foci

Together with students and colleagues I am interested in critically studying ongoing changes concerning border controls and deterrence mechanisms, such as maritime interceptions and offshore detention, as well as the border struggles and the criminalization of solidarity that result from those changes.

In light of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that has produced novel and unanticipated experiences of isolation, confinement, as well as social, economic and legal exclusion around the globe, my upcoming research involvement will also pay attention to regional and international mobility/migration restrictions and how they were legitimised and implemented. In particular, I am interested in how lockdowns, curfews, quarantine, social distancing and other mobility controls have affected people’s mobility in the Global South. For migration scholars, without any doubt, there will be many lessons to be learnt from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The pandemic forces people around the globe to re-negotiate and re-define rules and norms of mobilities previously taken for granted. It will be important to understand emerging frictions and, more significantly, to scrutinize overtly pragmatic but inherently unfair mobility solutions in regard to the ‘normalization’ of migration and mobility practices during and after the pandemic. The coming challenges, risks and opportunities will render the world oddly connected and disconnected at the same time. Combining the prolific stimuli from the classical migration studies and their focus on political problematizations of global divides with the broader foci of im/mobility studies onto geographic settings in the Global South, may prove to be very fruitful when it comes to achieving a greater sensibilization for urgent challenges in theory and practice in the context of the ‘new normal’.