I work in the field of the Environmental Humanities on questions of political ecology and environmental justice. What lies at the intersection of politics, economics, socio-ecologies and collective action is what I am after to understand. I do academic research, I teach and discuss as well as learn with others. I create dialogue between different ways of thought by curating events, exhibitions and by doing editorial work. I am also directly involved in a number of initiatives for collective reflection and local action.

During the past years, my research has been deeply concerned with our planet’s deserts. Drylands are not often seen as a space of distinctive and significant social relations, as sites of concrete histories and politics or of noteworthy ecological heritage and life. Rather, deserts widely figure as empty, timeless or dead and they have come to serve as a testing site for scientific exploration and presumed scientific advances. They morph into the backdrop of colonial and capitalist extraction and at the same time, deserts become dumping grounds in the toxic aftermath of our economic desires. I wrote my PhD dissertation at Goldsmiths, University of London, on this subject. In the analysis, I worked my way through the interplay colonial science and administration and the more contemporary extractivist capital production taking place in deserts in the case of Egypt. The thesis looks at a number of desert programmes in Egypt in the fields of land reclamation and corporate desert agriculture, the planning and construction of new desert cities (including Egypt’s New Administrative Capital) as well as in 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).

In 2018, Saba Zavarei and I founded the research lab and publishing platform Konesh. In Konesh we come together with others to discuss different ideas and approaches towards 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 exhibitions and events on those themes - one in London and one in Cairo.

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