Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: East Africa, colonial history, postcolonial history, refugee and migration issues, borders and borderlands, race and ethnicity, nationalism, separatism, pastoralism, biometrics

About Me: I am a researcher and professor with extensive, on-the-ground expertise in East Africa and a passion for examining one of the globe’s most pressing issues: migration. I have over a decade of experience carrying out archival research, fieldwork, and interviews in East Africa and collaborating with African scholars and practitioners. Over the years, I have honed a deep expertise based, in large part, upon listening to people.

My first book, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya, provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, refugee movements, and urban-rural migration and offers timely insights into the ways in which transnational populations navigate state borders. It draws from extensive archival research and over one hundred interviews that I conducted in Somali, Swahili, and English in Nairobi and the Kenya/Somali borderlands. At University College London, I am expanding upon many of these themes by conducting research on mobility, marketization, and biometric registration in East Africa.

I have a PhD from Stanford University and have worked and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and, now, University College London. With years of national and international teaching and public speaking experience, I am able to communicate my findings clearly and effectively to a wide range of audiences. I’ve also published in a variety of forums ranging from top academic presses to popular blogs.