Sambit Rimal.

What keeps drawing me back are problems where the traces we can observe do not transparently reveal the processes that produced them. I am drawn to explanations that keep that movement from trace to process visible, and suspicious when the trace becomes the process, resemblance becomes mechanism, or a useful description hardens into ontology.

I want to follow those traces backward, to ask what kinds of processes could have produced them and what becomes visible once we start comparing the possibilities.

I keep finding versions of this problem in places that are usually kept apart: in experiments on language and cognition, in signs and interpretation, in making sense of artificial systems, and in the infrastructures through which science itself gets made.

Most of the work I do has to stay with one of those paths at a time. Here I can follow the recurrences across them, make the longer jumps, and ask whether they really share a structure or only happen to look alike.