I am a medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body research group. My work contributes to the anthropological study of public, global, and planetary health, and is grounded in long-term ethnographic engagement in Dakar, Senegal.

I am currently completing my first book, a historical ethnography of the Senegalese popular ecology movement Set/Setal. At the heart of the book is a singular moment that unfolded in Dakar at the end of the 1980s, when, over the course of one intoxicating summer, young people began publicly cleaning their neighbourhoods while calling for a new form of collective existence through the cleansing and renewal of social and political life. Drawing on a blend of speculative methodologies, archival research, and ethnographic inquiry into the social meaning of public and bodily cleanliness, the book argues that the legacy of Set/Setal offers a vision of health “otherwise” that can revitalize, and perhaps redeem, the populist politics of health.

Between 2017 and 2021, I conducted research on everyday eating and the emergence of diet-related chronic diseases in suburban Dakar. This work explored how new pathologies were conceptualized and how they reshaped the ways people procured, prepared, and shared food. Findings from this research have been published in journals including Critical Public Health, Body & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Somatosphere.

Since joining the University of Amsterdam in 2021, I have worked concurrently on two new collaborative projects. The first, developed with Aminata Diallo, extends our long-term ethnographic engagement with suburban households that began in 2017. Drawing on longstanding relationships we study how households live through reproductive and inflationary crises and how they deal with sharp rises in the cost of food (2023-2026).

Our research pays particular attention to the complex promise of a traditional crop – millets – a grain that encapsulates both desires for longer term dietary sovereignty, and, eaten in the city as hot, sweet porridge, forms part of shorter-term strategies to cope with spiking prices.

In 2023, I used funding from the startersbeurs scheme to launch the KEF project (Knowledge Ecologies for Food Systems Transformation). In collaboration with the Senegalese NGO Enda Santé and the University of Ziguinchor, we began a research project on eating in Dakar’s sprawling and fast evolving peri-urban zone.  

Drawing on fieldwork at five sites across Petite Cote and the Special Economic Zone of Diass, we draw on co-creation methods and a coalition of expertise to analyze how eating is shaped by post agrarian relations that are inventive and experimental as well as melancholy.  

This project has grown into a Living Laboratory of everyday eating, the ‘SafLab’. You can read more about our approach to epistemic justice and decolonial thinking in our initial publication: Coproducing “Planetary” Eating Futures from Dakar | Gastronomica | University of California Press. More information about our project publications and our aspirations are available via the project website:  SafLab // A living laboratory of everyday eating

I teach and supervise across the BA in Anthropology and the Masters in Medical Anthropology and Sociology