I am interested in broad scale phenomena and systems such as transnational economies; foreign military, medical, and humanitarian interventions; and African politics. I focus on the people and institutions that make stories and realities of such systems invigorating, necessary, or detrimental to human life. My work tends to anchor economies and politics in Nigeria and the African continent as if these locations are the center of a necessary analytical universe. With a hopeful retention of a beginner’s mind, I regularly conduct research and write about:
postcolonial political economy, as an engagement with theories of capital in order to understand just how capitalism undergirds African life.
“popular” economies such as markets that are unregulated (or partially regulated), as well as the people who make them vibrant and thriving even while simultaneously undermining their life-giving intentions.
geopolitics, as a reimagined anthropological alternative that still takes African liberation seriously.
Black political thought, as a necessity for situating the status of the human (and other forms of life) and understanding how its futures can be otherwise dreamed.
African, feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, because of their endless decentering effects directed to constantly self-regenerating analytical Centers.
science and technology studies that is in deep dialogue with all of the above, providing fruitful objects of study to understand large-scale systems in new ways.
designing multiscalar ethnography, as a possibility for alternative and creative analytical arrivals.
PAST PROJECTS
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria, Duke University Press, 2014