Academic interests
I am a social anthropologist with a long-standing research interest in interventions that seek to alleviate poverty and ill-health in East Africa. Running through all my research is an interest in those efforts that seek to reimagine and reshape the distribution of expertise.
My first book, Caring Cash: Free Money and the Ethics of Solidarity in Kenya, is an ethnographic study of cash transfer programmes that offer small no-strings-attached cash grants to the poor. In doing so, these programmes recognise their recipients as experts in their own efforts to escape poverty. Part of escaping poverty also involves care, and this book focuses on the practices and values of care that were revealed and sometimes provoked by these programmes in a Nairobi urban slum. It argues that care should be understood as much as something that happens within a relationship as for a relationship. Seen in this way, it sheds light on how some acts that seem uncaring may be a form of care because they seek to ensure the bonds between people endure into the future.
My current book project explores the contours of very different forms of expertise. Based on long-term fieldwork in Tanzania studying 'leapfrogging' technologies, such as smartphones, off-grid electricity and machine learning, this project examines the lives and work of a new generation of Tanzanian experts.
I currently lead the Norwegian Research Council-funded project titled Bits, bytes and bodies: 'Local innovation' and digital healthcare in Tanzania. This builds upon and expands my research, since 2019, concerning Tanzanian-led efforts to design digital and Big Data-related technologies that respond to the unevenness of infrastructures of medical expertise in the country. This research was based at the Institute of Health and Society, and was part of the European Research Council project "Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa" led by Prof. Ruth Prince.
Background
I studied at the University of Oxford and Durham University, before receiving my PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Prior to my current position at the University of Oslo, I was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and before that lectured in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Grants
- Principle Investigator, Bits, bytes and bodies: Local innovation and digital healthcare in Tanzania, University of Oslo (Norwegian Research Council, Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, 2023-2027)
- Co-Investigator, mHEALTH-INNOVATE (led by NIPH), Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo (Norwegian Research Council 2022-2025)
Teaching
I currently convene the MA course 'So You Want To Be Critical? A Journey Through the Academic Tradition of Critique' (SUM4510) and co-convene 'Research Methods and Project Design (SUM4100). In 2022 I led a PhD course, Digitalisation, Health and Society. In a previous position at the University of Cambridge, I convened and taught courses on Economic Anthropology (SAN2), and Social Protection and Welfare (SAN8). There I also provided small-group teaching on a range of anthropological topics including anthropological theory, kinship, economics, politics, development and humanitarianism and political economy.
I currently supervise the following PhD student:
- Josephine Namitala (University of Oslo/Makerere University)
Publications
Books
2023. Caring Cash: Free Money and the Ethics of Solidarity in Kenya. Pluto Press (Anthropology, Culture and Society series). Now available for free on Open Access.
Peer-reviewed articles, and book chapters
Forthcoming. Hypeful worlds: Putting the brakes on critique in the Tanzanian techno-scientific landscape. American Ethnologist.
2022. Digital diagnostics from Tanzania: beyond mere technological fixing? Social Science and Medicine 319, 115306 (Open Access)
2022. Leapfrogging the Grid: Off Grid Solar, Self-reliance and the Market in Tanzania. Social Anthropology 30 (2), 140-160 (Open Access).
2022. Curious Utopias: Dreaming Big Again in the 21st century? (Introduction to special issue) With Ruth Prince. Social Anthropology 30 (2), 1-15 (Open Access).
2021. Solar Power and its Discontents: Critiquing Off-grid Infrastructures of Inclusion in East Africa. With Jamie Cross. Development and Change 52 (4), 902-926 (Open Access)
2021. Digital health in East Africa: Innovation, experimentation and the market. With Ruth Prince. Global Policy 12 (6), 65-74 (Open Access)
2020. Trusting the poor: Unconditional grants and the caring bureaucrat in a Kenyan slum. Anthropological Quarterly 93 (2), 119-149
2019. Inequality. In A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology (ed) J. G. Carrier. Edward Elgar Publishing.
2017. ‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: Detachment, ethics and the relational self in Kenya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, 748–764.
Editorial work
2022. Curious Utopias: dreaming big again in the 21st century? With Ruth Prince. Special issue for Social Anthropology 30 (2)
Non-peer reviewed articles and blogs
2023. Helping hand outs. The Mint Magazine
2020. The hype and hope of data for healthcare in Africa. Somatosphere.
2013. Surviving on identity. Vision – Cambridge University International Development Society (Easter Term) p.g. 10 - 11