I am a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and a researcher at CoFutures. I work at the intersection of comparative literature and environmental humanities, asking how speculative fiction, film, and visual arts from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and their diasporas imagine futures otherwise. I treat speculative fiction (SF) not as a genre but as a method. Whereas dominant futurist discourses lean on technological fixes, SF offers worldbuilding as a space of experimentation and ecological inquiry: a situated, justice-oriented, critical toolbox for imagining otherwise. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, and Turkish sources, I examine how writers and artists construct counter-futures in response to climate change, extractivism, and the violence of urban development projects.

At the center of this work is the politics of futurity itself as I examine who gets to imagine the future, and on whose terms. I theorize Arabfuturism and Gulf futurism as contested aesthetic and political formations that stage a fundamental tension between hegemonic visions of the future (top-down, technofuturist, colonial, profit-driven) and counter-hegemonic ones (grassroots, ecological, embodied, community- and justice-driven). My work also traces how SWANA creatives mobilize mythmaking, historical repair, aesthetics of embodiment, and feminist ethics of care as counter-futuring methods to challenge colonial legacies, techno-optimist futures, and universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene.

Before joining Utrecht University, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (now renamed Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) at the University of Oslo.