I am a cultural anthropologist and associate professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. I am also a research affiliate at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, jointly run by the University of Lagos (Nigeria) and the University of West Indies (Jamaica). I studied aquatic biology (BS, UC Santa Barbara), women studies (MA, San Francisco State University), and anthropology (PhD, Rice University). I currently conduct research in Nigeria and West Africa where I have interests in science and technology studies, capitalism, geopolitics, and visual arts.
Before becoming an academic I worked in the Bay Area (California, USA) as a crisis counselor in homeless and domestic violence shelters; I was also active in anti-violence coalitions. During that time, I had the chance to collectively envision the home without brutality; society without prisons; life lived by something other than capitalism and imperialism; entitlements to beauty and relaxation; and a world where ease, fulfillment, and dormant dreams can be actualized possibilities.
Being an anthropologist means energizing these visions in places I routinely teach (classrooms, yoga mats, meditation cushions) and interact (fieldsites, creative non-fiction forms, photographic arts, scholarly works, the streets, coffee houses, cozy living rooms, and backroom bars). These days, this means scaled up engagement with anti-racist/oppression practices and various experimental possibilities of individual/social liberation. Such practices invite more spaciousness for simplicity, compassion, theoretical discernment, increased flexibilities of the body, societal trauma release, and decolonial consciousness.
My ultimate aim is to embed these necessities into my teaching, research, and writing in order to help diagnose neoliberal times while aspiring to live life in the elsewhere and otherwise.