I am a social anthropologist with regional focus on South Asia and Southeast Asia. I have conducted ethnographic research in India and with overseas Indian groups in the UK, USA and the Netherlands. I have recently started new research in Indonesia.

Thematically my research has often addressed topics of mobility: transnational migration, transnational media flows, urban and rural mobility, and social class mobility. My PhD thesis was an ethnographic study of a Gujarati Muslim community in India and their overseas members in the UK (University of Amsterdam 2016). Further postdoctoral research resulted in the monograph New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India (University of Washington Press 2022), which theorises socioeconomic and spatial transformations in urbanising India. My new project Cycling Together (2026-30) investigates how bicyclists know and mediate the urban environment, and - on a more abstract level - how anthropological ways of knowing can support initiatives that try to make cities more sustainable.

As a visual anthropologist, I do not only write about my research but have also made ethnographic films, contribute to participatory media design, and build university structures that support a “beyond-textual” vision for knowledge production.

I am a tenured associate professor at the University of Vienna, where I serve as vice-head of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and head of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. I am associate editor of the journal Asian Anthropology and co-convener of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). In the past I held positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Tübingen, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore (NIAS).