About me

Personal background

I was socialized in the precarious and diverse neighborhood of Berlin-Neukölln, where I live and work today. Growing up in this environment continues to shape my perspective on the world and my professional practice. From living alongside and feeling connected to a wide variety of people in the neighborhood, I developed a desire to reflect on, understand, appreciate, negotiate, and reconcile different perspectives.

These experiences taught me how individuals and groups deal with (perceived) differences and with structural conditions - whether shared or divergent. They taught me how certain thoughts, actions, or experiences can give rise to feelings of loneliness vs. connectedness, exclusion vs. belonging, dissonance vs. harmony. They taught me to understand aspects of identity as both (social and individual) constructions AND powerful social realities shaped by processes of meaning-making, power, and violence. They taught me to take the simple path of direct encounter grounded in shared humanity, to never consider norms as universally valid, but to remain open to new perspectives and to grow together through them.

These early and somehow “raw-material” experiences resonate with the theories and practices I became familiar with. Many impressions initially lay side by side in a fragmented and unsorted way, until I found in certain intellectual traditions a conceptual home and a language - a grammar and vocabulary - that allowed me to sort and articulate these experiences in ways that felt meaningful and useful.

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Since my studies, I have engaged not only with psychology but also with philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies. I am particularly interested in philosophy of science and epistemology, social and moral philosophy, narrative theory, and theories of power and discrimination. I feel especially stimulated, resonated with, and shaped by poststructuralism/deconstruction, Critical Theory, intersectionality, de-/postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, class-critical approaches, and Subaltern Studies. I find work on epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance especially fascinating and important.

I admire and study (resistant) civil rights movements, counter-communities, and collective forms of solidarity. Particularly inspiring to me are concepts drawn from these discourses, such as: fluidity, hybridity, performance, solidarity-in-difference, and bottom-up universalism.

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Among the authors and activists who inspire me are:

Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Hannah Arendt, Étienne Balibar, Homi K. Bhabha, Omri Boehm, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Didier Eribon, Frantz Fanon, Nancy Fraser, Miranda Fricker, Michel Foucault, Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Sally Haslanger, bell hooks, Marsha P. Johnson, Audre Lorde, Thomas Piketty, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jason Stanley, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alok Vaid-Menon and Isabel Wilkerson.​