Research Profile
I am Professor of Gender, Culture & Ecologies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies (MCW) at Utrecht University. Since 2023, I direct the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP) and I am also Academic Director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG), which is hosted by Utrecht University.
Trained transdisciplinarily in Gender Studies, Sociology, Critical Theory and Literary Studies, my research focuses on critical inquiry in humanities and social science research, with specific focus on questions of ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and critical posthumanist perspectives. My work intervenes in cultural debates around societal differences and systemic conditions of inequality, and my critical attention lies most of all with the complexities of a relational understanding of the world. From an ecological perspective, I pay close attention to the inherent frictions, the processes of in/exclusion and the always asymmetrical power relations we inhabit.
In recent years, I initiated (together with Ida Hansen) the Relational Matters Archive, a series of online conversations that collects insights on how relationality as a matter of concern can help us attune to the specificity of today's planetary condition. With this project we hope to provide a dynamically growing archive to strengthen critically-aware theorization in the broader humanities and beyond academic contexts.
Together with Birgit M. Kaiser I have founded and coordinate since 2012 Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities . This research consortium consists of an international group of experts engaged in re-examine critical theory and critique for today's global and ecologically entangled conditions. Its aim is to highlight the Critical Humanities as a crucial site for meaningful analyses of our present times. Terra Critica also has a local practice 'ReadingRoom', organized together with Utrecht based Casco Art Institute .
Selected Publications