I was born in Australia, and it was home until my family moved to the Seattle area when I was young. It’s the first of several places I’ve called home — followed by Washington State, Los Angeles, Tunisia, Dublin, and wherever comes next. I hold both Australian and American citizenship, and while my professional and academic life has mostly unfolded in the United States and Europe, Australia is where a lot of the foundations were laid.
The UNICEF Book
When I was around seven, someone gave me a book that UNICEF had produced about the lives of children in different parts of the world. I don’t think anyone intended it to be a formative moment — it was a children’s book — but it was. Reading about kids my age who didn’t have access to clean water, couldn’t go to school, or had been displaced by conflicts I’d never heard of did something that stuck. It didn’t just make me aware that the world was unequal; it made me want to understand why. That impulse — not just to observe disparity but to trace its causes — has been the through-line of most of what I’ve done since.
It would be easy to romanticise that memory or overstate it, but I think the honest version is more interesting: a seven-year-old in Australia encountered something that didn’t make sense to her, and the instinct to figure it out never really went away. My undergraduate thesis on ethnoreligious nationalism, my fieldwork in Tunisia on women’s rights under political Islam, my MPhil dissertation on how right-wing movements co-opt the language of gender justice — these are all, in some sense, more sophisticated versions of the same question that book surfaced. Why do people get excluded? How does it get justified? What makes it feel normal to the people doing it?
Calling Multiple Places Home
Being someone who has lived across countries from a young age does something to how you see the world — not automatically, and not always in the ways people assume. The standard narrative is that it makes you “globally minded” or “culturally aware,” and those aren’t wrong exactly, but they’re too vague to be useful.
What it actually gave me is a habit of noticing what’s different and what isn’t. Moving from Australia to the Pacific Northwest as a child meant absorbing two sets of assumptions about how society works, what’s normal, what goes unquestioned. That experience of comparison — of seeing the same human dynamics play out in different cultural containers — became something I leaned into rather than grew out of.
When I studied abroad in Tunisia, I wasn’t just there as a foreign student encountering an unfamiliar context. I was doing what I’d been doing since childhood: arriving somewhere, paying attention to the specific ways it differed from what I knew, and trying to understand those differences structurally rather than just experientially. The independent research I conducted there — interviewing women in the suburbs of Tunis about their experience of women’s rights in the wake of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution — required exactly that combination of genuine cross-cultural sensitivity and analytical rigour.
The same instinct runs through my research on right-wing movements across the US and UK. My dissertation didn’t just compare two national contexts because it seemed like a tidy academic exercise. It compared them because the same rhetorical strategies — the appropriation of women’s rights language to justify xenophobia — appeared in both, adapted to local conditions. Recognising that pattern requires the kind of double vision that comes from never having lived entirely inside a single national frame.
What Australia Means Now
I haven’t lived in Australia for a long time, and I’m not going to pretend it’s where I do my work or where my professional networks are. But it matters to my story in a way that’s more than biographical. Being born somewhere and then leaving it — carrying that place with you while building a life in other places — creates a particular orientation toward belonging, identity, and the claims people make about who does and doesn’t count. Those are exactly the questions my research is about.
Australia also sits in the world in a way that’s analytically interesting for someone who studies nationalism and exclusion. It has its own complex history with Indigenous rights, immigration policy, and national identity — a history I’m aware of and continue to learn about, even at a distance. Growing up there, even briefly, means those dynamics aren’t abstract to me in the way they might be if I’d only ever encountered them in a textbook.
The simplest version: Australia is the first place that taught me to pay attention to the world beyond my immediate experience. The UNICEF book did part of that work. Moving away and looking back did the rest.