I am a queer feminist critical theorist and for quite some time my work circles around questions of planetary entanglements, socio-political transformations and relational coexistence. Engaging with both the onto-epistemological and ethico-political dimensions of Relation(al) Matters, my attention lies most of all with the troubling consequences of a relational understanding of the world; that is the inherent frictions, the processes of in- and exclusion and the always asymmetrical relations we inhabit. And yet, as a feminist critical thinker, the efforts of my work remain committed to emancipatory disruptions, the possibility for a becoming-otherwise and a push for change. As Professor of Gender, Culture & Ecologies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where I direct the Graduate Gender Programme and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG), I also devote much of my energy to the development and praxis of relational pedagogies in higher education. I hope to generate critical curiosity and the desire to enliven the world in view of the above stated commitments.
I hold a PhD from the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University where I also work as Lecturer in the Graduate Gender Programme and from where I co-founded the Relation(al) Matters Archive and conduct research inter alia as a member of the Queer Death Studies Network. Starting from feminist postcolonial and queer anti-separatist philosophies, my research approaches grief in radically performative terms, asking not what this phenomenon is but what it does to, or, how it animates a sense of the world and being in it. My engagements with contemporary biomedical research literature on grief as diagnosis and personal accounts of loss expand in teaching and research interests into feminist and queer uses of psychoanalytic theory, critical approaches to biomedicine and psychiatry, including theories of trauma, affect and embodiment, as well as theories of bio- and necropolitics.