I have two MAs, in Social Anthropology as well as Mongolian and Tibetan Studies, both from the University of Warsaw, as well as a PhD in Central Asian Studies from the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Throughout my academic career I ran my own research initiatives – both in Asia and in Europe – and also worked as part of large international projects. With ROADWORK (https://roadworkasia.com) I studied the “New Silk Road” and the flipside of connectivity brought by the Chinese infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative. Illegal wildlife trade, landscape fragmentation and transport-related exclusion were some of the many angles I considered as part of this analysis.

In addition to authoring numerous scholarly articles – about pastoral economy, animals and infrastructure, forced sedentarization of nomads in China, boarding schools, pop music and underground literature – I have also edited books and special issues, e.g. Roadsides (https://roadsides.net) and Nomadic Peoples, where I am an associate editor (https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/journals/nomadic-peoples/). Being keenly interested in innovative formats of knowledge transfer, I also co-authored a multimedia story called FIELDWORK https://creatinganthroknowledge.roadworkasia.com.

I was a Humboldt Excellence postdoc in Berlin and a fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. I have secured and managed grants from, among others, Trace Foundation, China and Inner Asia Council, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (Taiwan), National Swiss Science Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and National University of Mongolia.

I have offered courses on a wide range of topics, from feminist anthropology to illicit economies, resistance movements, political conflicts and proxy-wars, state repression of pastoralists, banditry, the anthropology of money, critical approaches to development, statelessness, and the Asian medicinal industry.

I have taught in Berlin, Zürich, Bern, Fribourg and Luzern, both in English and in German.

Today I mostly offer writing workshops for PhD students, and teach pitching and storytelling.