Overview
I am a political and economic anthropologist studying how people conceptualize political action in heavily constrained and autocratic landscapes.
My current book project investigates the political subjectivities of young, middle-class professionals in urban Uganda and their role in the recent wave of social justice movements in the country. The project charts the emergence of a budding progressive movement in Uganda and examines the discursive, material, and temporal tactics used to protect the movement from state-sanctioned surveillance and violence. At the heart of the book is an attention to how politics are made in time, specifically future time. Rather than the crisis-oriented timescapes that animate other political movements, progressive action in Uganda is oriented around a contingent, yet hopeful temporality – what I call the “time of somehow.” The book is an ethnographic contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of the future.
My new project is a multi-sited ethnographic project in Uganda and France on activism surrounding the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipe Line. The pipeline, which will be the longest electrically-heated crude oil pipeline in the world if completed, has been a political flashpoint in both Europe and Uganda, bringing climate activists, Ugandan politicians, and international investors together into complex negotiation spaces. The project explores the competing discourses of decolonization emerging through activism on the pipeline and their divergent narratives of political and environmental futures.
My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Halle Institute for Global Research. I received my PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2024.