My (short) story

In 1998, I discovered anthropology by accident.

(But maybe you are not interested in stories, in which case you can go directly to my CV.)

I was studying Arabic and Dutch at the University of Bucharest. In my third year I had won a scholarship to study one year of Dutch Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands. I enrolled in an optional called “Fundamentals of performance studies”, thinking I was going to learn how to be performant in life (forgive my younger self for having gotten brainwashed neoliberally). In the first class, we talked about Clifford Geertz, Deep Play, and the Balinese Cockfight, and I forgot to ask what the heck that had to do with me being performant.

I still don’t know how to be performant in life, but I dropped everything else to do anthropology from scratch.

When he heard that I had studied Arabic, my mentor from Leiden University, Professor Patricio Silva, sold me an amazing research topic for my BA thesis: the Palestinians in Chile. That was and will remain my first love in research.

I did my Masters at the URMIS (Unité de Recherches Migrations et Sociétés), Université Paris VII, in Migrations and Interethnic Relations, and wrote about the Palestinians in Chile, again.

Then, life got complicated and I went back to Romania, where I started working for a Roma NGO, doing applied research. I coordinated the research department, wrote or coordinated over twenty research & policy analysis reports, applied for (and often obtained) funding for research or social inclusion projects, and coordinated advocacy and community development projects.

One day at the end of 2010, I got the opportunity to enroll in a EU-funded PhD programme on Roma-related issues, and did research in the anthropology of development under the supervision of the fantastic and much regretted Professor Vintilă Mihăilescu. In 2014, I defended my thesis on “Empowering the Roma: Lessons from Development Practice” at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest and left a permanent job at the NGO to go back to academia.

Three days after I defended my PhD, I joined for postdoctoral research the Collaborative Research Center “Dynamics of Security: Forms of Securitization in Historical Perspective” at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and carried out an ethnography of formal and informal policing of the Roma in Rome, Italy. I spent some time with a far-right neighbourhood patrol and with a special police unit in the peripheries of Rome.

I am currently a Teaching Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland.