Research Program
My research draws from the political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, and African studies to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and socio-ecological change in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Tanzania. I am interested in understanding how agrarian landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles articulate with local and global capitalist forces, and how these processes (re)shape the multidimensional identities and subjectivities of rural women and men, as well as their relationships with the state, society, and the environment.
What animates these research interests is the broader question of how public policies and capitalist processes that aim to achieve various sustainability goals often end up reinforcing pre-existing social inequalities, or marginalizing the very groups they intend to serve. I am currently working on two projects that address these concerns. The first examines the phenomenon of ‘global land grabbing,’ or the recent surge in large-scale land investments in the global South for the production of food, fuel, and other primary commodities. The second focuses on the process of ‘sustainable livestock intensification,’ the transformation of subsistence-oriented pastoral and agropastoral systems into modern industrial livestock operations to increase meat and dairy yields while mitigating climate change and environmental degradation.
Current
Projects
Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures
This book project traces one of the most high-profile agricultural land deals signed by the Tanzanian government and foreign investors in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Known as the EcoEnergy Sugar Project, the Tanzanian government granted a 99-year lease to over 20,000 hectares of coastal farmland on which thousands of rural women and men live, to a Swedish investor who promised to mobilize over USD 500 million for commercial sugarcane production. Despite enormous political support from top-level government officials, international development agencies, and financial institutions, the project has remained stalled for over a decade since its inception in 2005/6.
Proposing to think with the heuristic of liminality—a lived experience and an ontological condition of being in-between—and the analytical sensibility of intersectionality, the study examines the relational entanglements of the Tanzanian state, the foreign investor, and the rural women and men that have shaped the unfolding dynamics of the EcoEnergy project against its apparent stillness or inactivity on the surface. Drawing on 18 months of visual ethnographic fieldwork in the district of Bagamoyo, it argues that the implementation of the land deal has been stymied by the convergence of political economic processes at multiple scales; the ambiguities in land tenure resulting from the legacy of previous rounds of state-led enclosures and dispossessions; as well as the determination of rural women and men to remain rooted on the land through diverse, and at times perverse, gendered strategies of everyday resistance.
The study underscores the importance of understanding the historical, cultural, political, and ecological contexts under which contemporary land deals unfold; it demonstrates that the landscape in Bagamoyo has been a product of people’s on-going material and symbolic relationships with nonhuman natures, while being deeply enmeshed in local and global dynamics of power and capital. In shedding light on how gender, class, race, generation, location, and other intersecting forms of difference have shaped people’s experiences of and responses to the liminal land deal, the study also raises critical questions about the trajectories of postcolonial development and nation-building for the Tanzanian state, as well as the meaning of identity and citizenship for those living in the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.
Flesh and Blood: Technoscience and Sustainable Livestock Intensification in Tanzania
Profound changes are underway in Africa’s livestock systems. To boost meat and dairy production and economic growth, African governments are working with donor agencies, agricultural research institutes, and corporate philanthropic foundations to transform the region’s predominantly subsistence-oriented pastoral systems into commercial livestock operations. In recent years, statistical projections of increased animal protein demand, combined with climate change concerns, has inspired numerous development programs on sustainable or “climate-smart” livestock intensification. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, addressing food and nutrition security in times of rapid urbanization and climate change will require major transformations in Africa’s livestock sector, especially enhanced animal productivity and efficiency, over the next 20 years. To that end, countries such as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda have recently launched their 15-year national “livestock master plans” with the support of the International Livestock Research Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These plans converge on the need for greater investments in “better genetics, feed, and health” and related institutional reforms to facilitate such investments.
This research uses the case of Tanzania to investigate how contemporary technological interventions to improve livestock production especially in light of climate change and urbanization are reshaping pastoral landscapes, livelihoods, and lifeways. The project weaves together and contributes to literature in political ecology, critical agrarian and development studies, feminist science studies, and animal geographies. Specifically, this research attends to the intersections of race, gender, class, species, and science that shape the locally specific manifestations and experiences of livestock improvement efforts in Tanzania, with broader implications and lessons for the wider region.