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 films and articles have often addressed topics of mobility, including 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 six 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 of social and cultural anthropology with a focus on visual anthropology at the University of Vienna. I am 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, University of Tuebingen, Leiden University, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore (NIAS).