More About Me

Many of the questions that inform my work began long before I became an anthropologist. Growing up in East Germany, close to the Bauhaus in Weimar and amid the dramatic changes of reunification, I became interested in how people respond to social transformation and imagine different ways of living. This curiosity has shaped a journey that has taken me across disciplines, countries and sectors, from indigenous communities and development programs in Latin America, corporate social responsibility programs and human-centered design in Silicon Valley to creative pedagogies in higher education and collaborative housing projects. What connects all of these experiences and projects is a continuing interest in how people create alternatives through new forms of learning, living and collaborating.

Learning otherwise: how can we educate differently?

Growing up in East Germany, I experienced a highly structured and ideologically prescribed school system. Education prioritized correct answers over critical inquiry and questioning the party line was discouraged and could have severe repercussions. Moving to Canada and then spending a year traveling in Latin America showed me different cultures, meaning systems and social organizations. These discoveries led me to study Anthropology in Canada and the US, which transformed how I experienced education. Yet as I moved through academia and started to teach myself, I became increasingly aware that critical thinking can become limiting when it focuses primarily on critique, deconstruction and identifying what is wrong, without trying to provide ways to move beyond these issues.

Inspired by design thinking and participatory learning I had encountered during my PhD research in California and Latin America and the Steiner schools my children were attending in New Zealand, where I took up a position at the University of Auckland, I became interested in the role of creativity, imagination and experimentation in helping people move beyond critique towards the creation of alternatives. This journey ultimately led to the development of the Creative University project and my Critical-Creative Pedagogy, as a way of teaching and learning in higher education that can better equip students to understand contemporary challenges, imagine alternative responses to them and work collectively to bring these into being.

Dwelling otherwise: how can we live together differently?

Similar to my educational journey, my interest in housing also began in my childhood and youth. When I was little, my family lived in one of the ubiquitous pre-fab housing blocks that the East German government saw as the answer to its ambitious housing plans. Later, we moved into a terraced house that my grandfather had helped to build as part of a housing cooperative. After 1989, they were sold into private ownership. Since then, I have lived in cities around the world that became unaffordable before my eyes, through gentrification, housing speculation and market financialization.

My work on collaborative housing has been shaped by these experiences. Through long-term action research with student housing co-operators and engagement with housing practitioners and activists, mainly as a director of the Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust, I have been exploring how collaborative and community-led housing initiatives can create new ways of living together based on cooperation, shared governance and mutual support. I am particularly interested in how personal politics, social relations and intergenerational dynamics give rise to physical designs and in what these experiments can teach us about building more equitable and sustainable futures.

Organizing otherwise: how can we mobilize together for better futures?

My interest in different forms of organizing has been shaped by experiencing very different political systems and the possibilities they create or constrain for individual and collective action. Growing up in East Germany under an authoritarian regime, and ultimately defecting in April 1989, left me deeply aware of the dangers of centralised power and the importance of democratic participation. Living in Quebec in Canada introduced me to more social democratic forms of governance, but it was not until my anthropological research with Indigenous communities in north-western Argentina, where I learned about and participated in their struggles to defend their culture and reclaim their land against powerful political and economic interests that I truly started thinking about the power of grassroots political mobilization.

In 1999, I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area to start my PhD at UC Berkeley, at the height of the dot-com boom, with its rampant capitalist greed and technology evangelism. Alongside both I studied the emergence of new forms of social entrepreneurship that sought to mobilize technology and collective resources for social change. Today, my work on housing justice and collaborative housing continues this exploration of how people organize to address shared challenges through collective forms of participation and mobilization. Teaching a class on Activism to students from around the world introduces me every spring to new international social and political movements and the role of young people in them, which renews my hope about the possibilities of creating alternative futures through collective action.