Biography
I am an anthropologist whose research explores welfare, politics, and development in Senegal. I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where I am now a Research Associate and the department’s Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator. Before my doctorate I completed an MRes in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology at University College London, and a BA in History at King’s College London.
Research
My doctoral research explored the politics of welfare and social protection through two flagship projects: the bourse familiale, a national cash transfer, and Couverture Maladie Universelle (universal health coverage). Introduced as grand projets at the heart of Senegal’s development plan, these programmes formed part of a broader politics of la sociale, the French shorthand for welfare or social policy, and a term that in Senegal carries a culturally specific and expansive meaning. Drawing on twenty months of doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork in a small informal settlement in Dakar, this work examines how moral and material claims sustain political life in Senegal. I am currently developing this research into a monograph.
My new project, Housing Futures at Senegal’s Urban Frontier, builds on this through a study of the national housing agenda. It follows residents in the process of being resettled from the site of my doctoral research, alongside other pathways into the programme, including inclusive loans and housing cooperatives. Focusing on two new towns being built on the outskirts of Dakar and the second city, Thiès, the project examines the political, temporal, and moral stakes of state promises for housing.
Alongside my research, I am developing collaborative and public-facing projects, including a photography collaboration with two Dakar-based photographers documenting the resettlement. As Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator, I also support the Department across impact, research culture and grant writing.
Research interests
Development; displacement; housing; politics; poverty; resettlement; Senegal; social protection; temporality; cities; welfare.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
2024. Invoking Senghor: Universal Healthcare Coverage and the Place of Culture in Senegal. Medicine Anthropology Theory. 11(2), 1-8. (link)
2023. Patronage, Partnership, Voluntarism: Community-based health insurance and the improvisation of universal health coverage in Senegal. Social Science & Medicine. 319, 115491. (link), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115491
Book reviews
2024. Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market, An anthropology of endings, by Gunvor Jónsson. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. (30(4), 1164-1165. (link)
2023. A Slow Emancipation. Africa is a Country. (Review of: Slaves for Peanuts, A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop that changed History, by Jori Lewis). (link)
2017. Give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution, by James Ferguson. Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 30(4), 415-417. (link)
2017. Afrotopia, by Felwine Sarr. Africa at LSE blog. (link)
Other writing
2024. The case of the CFA franc and a case for South-centred scholarship. Development Studies Association/ European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes workshop blog. (link)
2024. Diomaye’s first weeks. Africa is a Country. (link)
2024. New Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator. Department of Social Anthropology website. (link)
2023. Geographies of Hope. Development Studies Association. ‘The Politics of Development’ workshop blog. (link)
2022. The State and Social Welfare in the 21st Century. CRASSH conference blog, with Courtney Hallink. (link)
2020. Different Ways of Knowing: Paradise Cinema Interviewed. The Quietus. (Interview and translation, for the writer). (link)
2020. A ‘grand projet’: Senegal’s Universal Health Coverage.’ Special Issue: Health for all? Anthropological and historical perspectives on ‘Universal Health Coverage.’ Somatosphere.
2018. The Ideal meets the Practical. Citizen’s Basic Income Trust. Newsletter, 1, 3-6. (link)
Teaching and Supervisions
SAN7a: Ethnographic Areas: Africa
SAN8: Environment, Development and Indigeneity
Undergraduate supervision
SAN1: Social Anthropology: The Comparative Perspective
SAN6: Power, Economy and Social Transformation
SAN8: Environment, Development and Indigeneity
Postgraduate supervision
MPhil in Social Anthropological Research
