I joined the Connecting Three Worlds project as a postdoctoral researcher in January 2022. My contribution to the project explores the contours, political and intellectual origins, and collaborative co-production of Derg-era public health at different scales, and traces its contemporary legacies in the practice and politics of global health in Ethiopia. As elsewhere, socialist-era health and medicine in Ethiopia was generally characterised by the linking of public health with wider revolutionary objectives, as well as by the primacy of preventative interventions. With an emphasis on maternal and child health and childcare practices (the latter supplemented by a Wellcome Trust/ Birkbeck Research Fellowship in 2022-3), my research will contribute to three interlinked areas of interest: community health workers and gendered forms of care; socialist internationalism and knowledge transfer; and negotiating post-socialist legacies in public health.
Prior to joining Birkbeck, I was ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham.
My ESRC-funded PhD in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College, awarded in 2020, is an account of Ethiopia’s developmental state through the lens of its lowest-level employees. Through attention to the everyday lives of public servants, it contributes to understandings of labour, mobility and the state, and expands understandings of precarity in Africa beyond informal employment. Based primarily on long-term ethnographic research with rural public servants, I explore how bodies, materials and substances are integral to the continual construction of the state, with a particular focus on health extension workers.
2024. ‘Countering amnesia: The importance of anthropology and history in global health’. Co-authored with Sebastián Fonseca and David Bannister. In The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health. London: Routledge.
‘The PhD parenting penalty’. In The Lives of Early Career Researchers. HEPI Report No. 169. London: British Academy and Higher Education Policy Institute.
2022. Book review: ‘Melaku Geboye Desta, Dereje Feyissa Dori, and Mamo Esmelealem Mihretu (eds.), ‘Ethiopia in the Wake of Political Reform’.’ Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 25.
2021. Book review: ‘Marco Di Nunzio, ‘The Act of Living: Street Life, Marginality, and Development in Urban Ethiopia’.’ Africa 91(1).
2018 ‘Coffee and the State in Rural Ethiopia.’ Anthropology Matters 18(1). Winner of the 2017 Christine Wilson Graduate Award by the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, American Anthropological Association.
‘’Great job mommy!’ On the absurdity of teaching Ethiopian women to breastfeed’. AllegraLab [in press].
‘Counting fake latrines: Performing the state in rural Ethiopia’. Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale [under review]
Stable Jobs, Precarious Lives: Rural Public Servants in Ethiopia. International African Library, Cambridge University Press. [in preparation].
