Welcome to my website! I am a sinologist by training and a social anthropologist by fieldwork. My interest is enabling spaces for transnational civil society dialogue in the context of Global China. This website has been online for almost twenty years.
University took me from the Overseas Chinese communities of Malaysia to the Mainland of China. Later on, I followed China to the African continent and took a deep dive into Africa-China relations. My PhD led me to Zambia and its copper mines.
Since November 2022, I work at Stiftung Mercator's Centre for Europe in the World in Essen, Germany. As project manager I am responsible for the foundation's China portfolio. Before that I was China Programme Manager at Stiftung Asienhaus.
I have published on fieldwork access and anthropological knowledge production, post-colonial social change between ruination and renovation as well as civil society engagement in and with (Global) China. Check out my publications at ORCİD.
Since my father taught me how to pronounce 'Multispektralkamera' as a toddler, I am interested in photography. Always with my camera at hand, I attempt to submerge into the world around me.
I started my fieldwork with an enquiry into a Chinese run mine on the Zambian Copperbelt. I wanted to study how Chinese and Zambians encountered each other in the context of mining. Access challenges forced me to redesign my research for the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
A talk by Hans Rosling first directed my interest to data visualisation. My d3 experiments include a visualisation of the ownership structures of Zambia's copper industry, the relationship between Zambia's economy and the copper price as well as Zambia in the headlines of the People's Daily.
It was during my time to secure funding for my PhD that I participated in the 2013 logo competition of the Chinese in Africa / Africans in China Research Network. Eventually, my submission based on the Chinese character for 'reciprocal' hù 互 won. Learn more about the research network...
Much of what you read about on this website has its origin in my year as an AFS exchange student in Malaysia in 2001. It was in Malaysia's Kulim, Penang, Ipoh, Kuala Terengganu and Kuala Lumpur where I first encountered China: the Chinese characters and the communities of the Overseas Chinese.
During fieldwork I systematically collected geographical data on the location of the former social welfare buildings in Mpatamatu and the spatial arrangement of the township’s sections. This included data on the course of streets and footpaths, surface materials, streams and buildings. I compared this information with historical maps I found in the archives. The product of this mapping process is openly accessible at OpenStreetMap.org thanks to Erik Falke.