Research Program
How and why do development policies and processes that aim to improve the human condition and the environment often reinforce existing power structures and marginalize the groups they intend to serve?
This longstanding question drives my research program. Over the years, I have channeled this central animating concern into three research projects. Using Tanzania as an analytic case, these projects investigate some of the most contentious issues in contemporary development and environmental politics: large-scale agricultural/land investments, sustainable livestock intensification, and the critical minerals rush. These distinct but interrelated issues provide a window into the rural as a key site of capitalist development, a space of struggle, and a so-called sacrifice zone for powering low-carbon futures and the ever-increasing demands of modern urban life.
My work draws on and contributes to multiple interdisciplinary fields, including feminist political ecology, the political economy of development, critical food and agrarian studies, African studies, science and technology studies, and critical animal studies. Influenced by feminist and postcolonial theories, I have an enduring interest in ethnography as an analytical practice that attends to the complexities and contradictions of everyday life and the ways these lived experiences articulate with dynamic extra-local processes. My empirical methods include observations, interviews, focus groups, archival research, oral histories, and participatory visual methods, including community mapping and photovoice (participant-driven documentary photography and visual storytelling).
Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures
Cornell University Press, 2024
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In the mid-2000s, the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert over 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land into a sugarcane plantation to produce sugar, electricity, and ethanol. Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified the project as another in a long line of failed modern resource grabs. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, and participatory visual research, I argue that such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender, history, and culture shaped the project’s unfolding, but also how, even in its stalled state, the deal upended social life on the land by setting in motion incomplete processes of development and dispossession. By tracing the lived experiences of diverse rural women and men and their struggles for survival under a seemingly endless condition of liminality, I raise critical questions about the directions and stakes of postcolonial development in Tanzania, as well as the shifting meanings of identity and belonging for those on the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.
This research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and various grants from Cornell University. Open-access publishing was made possible by the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, the Berkeley Excellence Accounts for Research Program, and the Energy and Resources Group.
Technoscience, Pastoralism, and the Making of “Climate-Smart” Livestock in Africa
This project examines how contemporary development and scientific interventions to intensify livestock production in times of climate change are transforming pastoral landscapes, livelihoods, and knowledge systems in Africa. I am specifically interested in the ways semi-nomadic pastoralists perceive, negotiate, and/or resist state and donor efforts to introduce improved animal genetics, feeds, and other efficiency-enhancing technologies, and how these interventions reshape human-animal-environment relations in semi-arid Tanzania. Another component of this research, for which I am collaborating with activists from an indigenous pastoralist organization and researchers from local universities, is building a digital repository or a “living archive” of pastoral lifeworlds. The long-term goal is to support pastoral communities’ desires to preserve their inherited knowledges of herding, foraging, animal care, breed conservation, and cultural rituals, while countering the dominant development paradigm that sees pastoralism as backward, inefficient, and redundant.
This research is supported by the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship, the Society of Hellman Fellows, and several internal grants from UC Berkeley
The Political Ecologies of Rare Earth Mining in Africa
My third and the most nascent project is part of a larger grant in collaboration with colleagues in natural and physical sciences. The project aims to: a) develop a novel bio-hydrometallurgical process to recover rare earth elements in safe and ecologically sound ways without heavy reliance on toxic chemicals; and b) understand the social, ethical, and environmental dimensions of extractive practices in emerging rare earth frontiers. I am leading the second component of this research in southwestern Tanzania, where the national government and a foreign company have recently signed a deal to construct the nation’s first mine for the extraction of rare earth metals, used in making wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other so-called green technologies. Over the next three years, I will investigate the processes of mine development and its (potential) operation, and the effects thereof on local livelihoods, gender relations, and environmental-reproductive health. This project builds on my longstanding work on land enclosures, while bringing a new focus on extractive industries and engaging with urgent debates on critical mineral supply chains and the costs of renewable energy transitions.
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation.