C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Migration and Mobility, Urban Anthropology, Law, Bureaucracy and the State, Policing, Race and Racialisation, Anthropology of the Body and the Senses
Research Area(s)
India, Nigeria, Uganda (South Asia, West Africa)
Profile
I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow who joined the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ in September 2023.
An anthropologist with a regional focus on South Asia and global Africa–India encounters, I have wide-ranging research and teaching interests in the anthropology of migration, urbanism, race, embodiment, policing, and the state. My scholarship has examined contemporary Africa–India migrations as an entry point to investigate tensions emerging from “new” cultural, political, and economic encounters in the Global South. I am keenly interested in questions of conflict and conviviality as well as social difference and identity in relation to urban futures, and the intersections between race, gender, and sociocultural boundary making. I also have an interest in themes of “illegality” and “informality” and relational experience(s) of law and state power as lived in the socio-legal urban periphery. I am currently working on a monograph that examines contemporary patterns of transnational mobility from the African continent to India. Based upon long-term ethnography conducted in Delhi since 2015 with African migrants (mostly from Nigeria), Indian residents, market, and state actors cohabiting in unplanned settlements, the book documents how urban transformations in cities across India shape localized citizen–migrant interactions amidst changes in global networks of capital and labour and how paradigms of anti-black racism draw upon caste- and religion-inflected discourses of exclusion in their intersection with global and hegemonic representations of race.
My next project engages with the complexities of deportation policing in India. Empirically situated in Delhi, the project aims to ethnographically document various social, material, and biometric forms of deportation policing, and the impact of such dis/connected infrastructures on differently racialized migrant populations (African migrants and Bengali South Asian migrants).
Alongside ethnographic fieldwork, I am keenly interested in methodologies of visual storytelling and collaborative semi-fictional writing. I am also an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Sociology, University of Tübingen, and Research Affiliate with the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford.