I work in the field of political ecology and environmental justice. At the moment, I am a junior fellow at the University of Basel in Switzerland in the “Forum Basiliense”. The forum is an interdisciplinary research space with a new annual topic each year. This year, I am doing research alongside other fellows on the subject “Life in the Anthropocene”. In January 2026, I will be joining Georgetown University in Qatar to teach as a Visiting Assistant Professor different courses in political ecology and I will work with students on my passion project, the desert.

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 very interested in the field of finance because 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 but also, of course, figuratively, in the sense of the price that we pay because of loss, destruction and annihilation of sites, species, cultures or histories. To tackle these problems, I do research, I teach, I write and I curate. I love to do research together with others and I also enjoy bringing other people’s voices and their works together whether it is in exhibitions, publications or events.

In 2018, my friend Saba Zavarei and I founded 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, the CHASE Climate Justice Network and the Post-Matterialisms reading group.

Since 2017, my research has been deeply concerned with our planet’s deserts. Drylands are not often seen as a space of significance. Instead, they are treated as empty, timeless or dead and as a result of that, deserts have come to serve as a mere background of action. Arid regions across the globe have morphed into the mere backdrop of colonial and capitalist extraction. They have become the dumping grounds in the toxic aftermath of modernity’s economic desires. I wrote my PhD dissertation at Goldsmiths, University of London on this subject. In the research, I worked my way through the interplay of colonial science and colonial bureaucracies intertwined with more contemporary extractivist capital production that is taking place in arid regions in the case of Egypt. The research surfaced the inherent dependencies of contemporary modes of extraction and production together with colonial actions and ideas of arid thresholds. In concrete, the dissertation looked at three distinct subjects: one, land reclamation and corporate desert agriculture, two, the planning and construction of new desert cities (including Egypt’s New Administrative Capital) and three, Egypt’s mining industries, specifically the mining of gold. The PhD was supervised by Dr. David L. Martin in Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London and it was examined in June 2024 by Prof. Harriet Hawkins (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Prof. Laleh Khalili (University of Exeter).

At the moment, I am working together with my colleague Dr. 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.