Bio

I am a cultural anthropologist focused on political and urban dynamics, especially in Africa. My research explores how ethnic identity, humanitarian governance, conflict, sovereignty, and ideas of the future manifest in everyday urban life. I have been doing ethnographic research in South Sudan since 2012, one year after it became the world’s newest nation-state. In my work on South Sudan, I explore how the idea of the state and conceptualizations of the future are imagined and made real in light of a broader postcolonial and neoliberal context that I argue might best be conceptualized as “post-state.”

At NC State, I regularly teach Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Humanitarianism and International Justice, Urban Anthropology, Technology in Society and Culture, and Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology.

I  regularly teach a seminar for the Honors College called Revolution, Resistance, and the State. In summer 2025, I launched a CUREs (Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience) course called Researching the City that is a Packways recognized High Impact Experience. Through it, students learn qualitative methods and social scientific theory as they carry out ethnographic research in Raleigh.

I have previously taught at the University of California, Davis and the University of Juba in South Sudan.

Projects

My book, The Post-State State: Urban Futures in South Sudan, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

I am also conducting several collaborative research projects. One project is a study of a small-scale money-transfer network with centers throughout northern and eastern Africa. The network is run by South Sudanese humanitarian professionals who aim to disrupt aid dependency by offering an alternative financial infrastructure to South Sudanese displaced by recent and ongoing political conflict. I use the network as a vantage point to understand future-oriented action, the creation of communities of displaced South Sudanese in and around urban spaces, and the creative ways people generate new forms of work and exchange outside the confines of state-driven directives and humanitarian governance. Alongside this research, my South Sudanese partners and I are planning to conduct a community-led research project on life in the displaced people’s camp in Bentiu, South Sudan. The camp is the largest in the country and its residents have had to weather the shift in control of the camp from the UN to the South Sudanese government and the recent withdrawal of life-saving international aid. Most recently, seasonal flooding did not recede and has destroyed grazing and farmland while displacing even more people. Through community-led ethnographic research, we seek to capture and understand residents’ ongoing challenges, the forms of sociality and locally-led governance that have emerged in the camp, and forms of thriving and planning people partake in. We will disseminate findings locally, through South Sudanese media channels, and in policy circles so as to center the voices and perspectives of people typically treated as passive recipients of aid.

I also continue to collaborate with Okuja Vincent, an Ugandan artist and art therapist I first met while working with the Peace Corps in Uganda and who accompanied me on my earliest fieldwork in South Sudan. I have incorporated his visual representations of South Sudan into my presentations and my book. We plan to compile his representations of South Sudan and northern Uganda and his reflections on his long-term use of art therapy among youth impacted by the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict into digital galleries and other publications.

Graduate Advising

As an Affiliate Graduate Faculty Member, I teach courses that carry graduate credit. I regularly advise students pursuing the M.A. in Anthropology and PhD in Sociology in my department as well as students in the Master of International Studies program and in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program.

Selected Research Publications

The Post-State State: Urban Futures in South Sudan, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press

“Financial Infrastructure of ‘Incompleteness’ in South Sudan,” Anthropology News, May 4, 2026

“How Thöŋ Piny Became Juba Na Bari: Placemaking and Social Memory in Urban South Sudan,” IJURR: The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2024

“Sovereignty from ‘Ground Zero’: Power through Performance in Independent South Sudan,” Nations and Nationalism. 2022

“Returning, Remaining and Remaking: Urban Space in Post-conflict Transition,” co-authored with Naseem Badiey, Parangolé: A Journal about the Urbanized Planet. Issue 1: 82-85.

“Improvising Juba: Productive Precarity, ‘Companies,’ and Making the Present at the Edge of the Indian Ocean World,” in Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds, Edited by Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng’weno, and Neelima Jeychandran, Routledge. 2020

“Planning Amidst Precarity: Utopian Imaginings in South Sudan,” co-authored with Naseem Badiey. The Journal of Eastern African Studies, 12(2): 367-385. Also published in Urban Africa and Violent Conflict Edited by Karen Büscher, Routledge, 2019

Funded Research

Dissertation Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation; Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, National Science Foundation

Area(s) of Expertise

Anthropology of Africa; Political Anthropology, the State, and State-Making; Futurity and Temporality; Cities, Urban Space, Place-Making; Ethnographic Methodology; Migration and Mobilities; Revolution and Post-Liberation Politics; Visual Anthropology