What gives you hope?
Now I think of Emily Dickinson and her suggestion that “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Hope is something that we have to nurture within ourselves, whether something gives us hope or not. I grew up a refugee in Europe, and sometimes I find little to hope for, but I strive towards maintaining it within myself.

How does change happen?
I have spent a lot of my research career in Sri Lanka and in India analyzing not how does change happen but how does the tremendous changes that war, violence, aspirations towards transformation and profound social transformation shape ordinary life and the very differentiated ways in which changes shape people's lives. People make change. But what forces and structures shape their imaginaries of those changes and what happens, that is what I see as the task of social science to understand. Changes change differently, Balibar tells us.

What's your current favorite Read/Song or Artist?
I am a voracious reader and so I am only picking from the books Ive read in the last three months: Seven Moons of Mali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Severance by Ling Ma, and Real People by Danzy Senna. Ive read so many amazing books over the last few years, the two books that have made a huge impression on me in the last five years are Han Kang’s Human Acts and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.