ABOUT ME
I am an anthropologist who works at the intersection of the anthropology of globalization and development, science and technology studies, political anthropology, and the history of knowledge. Specifically, I am interested in the many forms of infrastructure (epistemic, political, material, affective, off-grid, etc.) and their associated labors which sustain our current livelihoods and orient our collective futures. I am currently a postdoc researcher in the research lab PASSAGES at the University of Bordeaux.
My research has centered on “the global” as an emerging space where policy-making is taking place through specific processes and logics. Ethnographically, I have conducted fieldwork across India, Kenya, and USA to examine evidence-based development in the making, a polymorphous movement to reduce poverty in the global South by using experimental evidence to shape policies and programs at scale around the world. At stake in my research is to document the imaginations of a better world made of ideas but also centrally constituted through repeated practices and technologies that sustain evidence-based development. This has also led me to conduct research about infrastructure (and its absence) in places that are not connected to piped water in Kenya.
I am increasingly interested in the concept of "impact" at a moment where development organizations, corporations, and governing bodies are pressed to demonstrate the effects they have on our world. So I am a developing a project to investigate materially how impact is understood, measured, produced, or still resisted in a multiciplity of fields.
In collaboration with the Africa Gender Innovation Lab at the World Bank, I am currently leading research on women’s wellbeing in the context of precarious work in Burkina Faso. This project seeks to understand women’s situated experiences of both motherhood and employment in relation to changing landscapes of (formal and informal) childcare practices across sub-Saharan Africa.
I am also an avid teacher and communicator who has taught and presented on evidence-based policy, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of infrastructure across Europe, Canada, the USA, Turkey, and Morocco.