Michael is an explorer and anthropologist. His work focuses on the impacts of extreme journeys on the deepest part of people’s subjective being: their identity.
He has worked with refugees in Jordan and Bangladesh, undocumented migrants in the US-Mexico borderlands, and analogue astronauts in the US and Europe. He uses a variety of innovative ethnographic methods to reach remote communities, bridge language barriers, and dig into art, photography, and storytelling.
His current project uses analogue (simulated) missions to ask how journeys to the stars change astronauts, with the goal of creating a dialogue between terrestrial and extraterrestrial migration. What can we learn from extreme journeys on Earth as we make plans to send astronauts to space stations, the Moon, and Mars? Reciprocally, how can we look back from our journeys in space to gain a new perspective of journeys on Earth?
