I am an Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body research group. I am a critical medical anthropologist and my work centers on the practice of public, global and planetary health, drawing on long term ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal.

My monograph Lines of Sight: Public Health in a Senegalese Image World (under review) brings together visual and medical anthropology to examine how health authorities, filmmakers, Sufi urban artists, and environmental activists created publics around depictions of the body. Analyzing vernacular images for their didactic efficacy, and public health interventions for their auratic potentiality, Lines of Sight examines the immersion of public health communication in local image worlds and media ecologies. Through a series of communicative cases (health literacy, suasive speech, mass protest, dramaturgical scenarios, and the representation of the unseen), Lines of Sight asks how the calibration of communitas embedded in Senegalese images can help us to imagine and practice a different kind of public health.

Since 2018 my research has focused on everyday eating and the politics of diet in urban Senegal. My work on the impact of the emergence of chronic disease on how people procure, prepare and share food has been published in Critical Public Health,  Body and Society, Food and Culture, and Somatosphere.

While conducting research on living with chronic disease I often heard my interlocuters say that modern bodies could be healed through a reimagining of the urban diet and a return to “traditional” foodways. This led me to refocus my work on the complex promise of one crop: millet. Considered in Senegal a potential alternative to imported rice, millets and other “ancient grains” are increasingly imagined in a range of global contexts as a panacea for the interlocking ecological, economic and nutritional challenges facing the global food system.

In 2023 I conducted fieldwork with my collaborator Aminata Diallo to investigate the role of millet in mitigating the impact of an inflationary food price crisis. While often hidden from sight, “traditional” millets play a vital role in urban social reproduction, helping urban households to ride out moments of acute food insecurity. This ongoing work forms the basis of my second monograph which will examine the urban food crisis from the perspective of Dakarois involved in the buying, selling, transformation, cooking and eating of food.

I strive to make the findings of my research accessible and impactful. In collaboration with the Senegalese NGO Enda Santé I have initiated a new project Knowledge Ecologies for Food Transformation (KEF). The KEF project aims to generate new knowledge about community based nutrition and to generate new approaches to epistemic justice and reciprocal transformation in research collaborations.

I coordinate an undergraduate Theme Course, the Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body. I also co-teach the course Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory on the Medical Anthropology and Sociology Masters Programme.