I work in the field of political ecology, environmental politics, and environmental justice. At the moment, I am Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. I teach a variety of courses on the climate crisis and how different people, from activists to artists, promote change for climate justice.

In my research and in my curatorial work, I engage with what others have called “socio-natures”. These are environments that are shaped and influenced by humans, technologies and other creatures. My focus is to see how specific socio-natures have taken form over time; what informs socio-environments and who? More recently, I have come to be particularly interested in the field of finance. I want to understand not only what shapes environments, and who, but also, at what price does this change take place? I mean this quite literally in terms of the actual monetary price and also, figuratively, meaning the price we pay for loss or destruction of sites, species, cultures, or histories.

My passion project is to support a better understanding of our planet’s deserts. Governments, militaries and trans-national investors as well as corporations do all sorts of interventions in desert regions often at mega scale and away from any public oversight or scrutiny. I wrote my PhD dissertation at Goldsmiths, University of London on this subject, looking specifically at the case of Egypt. In the research, I worked my way through colonial science and colonial bureaucracies to the more contemporary projects of capital production taking place across Egypt’s arid regions. The dissertation looked at three specific areas of desert projects: land reclamation and corporate desert agriculture; the planning and construction of new desert cities (including Egypt’s New Administrative Capital), and finally, Egypt’s mining industries, specifically the mining of gold. The PhD was supervised by David L. Martin in Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London and it was examined in June 2024 by Harriet Hawkins (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Laleh Khalili (University of Exeter).

Last year, I did a research fellowship at the University of Basel in Switzerland as part of the “Forum Basiliense” working alongside other fellows on the subject “Life in the Anthropocene”.

My friend Saba Zavarei and I founded, in 2018, the research lab and publishing platform Konesh. Konesh creates opportunities for discussing the politics of space. So far, we have published two edited volumes - under the subjects Scale and Trace - and we have curated two multi-media events on those themes, one in London and one in Cairo.

I have also been supporting the work of different research collectives such as Network of Urban Studies in Egypt, theCHASE Climate Justice Network and the Post-Matterialisms reading group.

At the moment, I am working together with my colleague Dalia Wahdan (American University in Cairo) on a research project that looks at land speculation taking place on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast in Ras el Hekma. This research is part of the “Pathways beyond Neoliberalism: Voices from MENA” project of the American University in Cairo.