I moved to Gulu, the largest town in the Acholi region of northern Uganda, in 2006 and lived there until 2017, and I continue to spend much of my time there as it is not only where my research is focussed but where I think of as home. I first moved there during the Lord’s Resistance Army to work on a peace project, and my early research was on former combatants and transitional justice interventions; later I worked as a consultant on a variety of development projects.

In 2011-13 I co-led a research programme for the United Nations Peacebuilding Programme mapping land conflict, and in 2014-2017 undertook research consultancies for LSE’s DfID-funded Justice and Security Research Programme. Since 2017 I have had staff posts with LSE, working on the Trajectories of Displacement and CPAID grants (ESRC) and the Deconstructing Notions of Resilience grant (Rockefeller Foundation / IGA). My research themes included approaches to distress and dysfunction, and formal and informal justice systems in Acholi; and gender relations amongst the Karamojong pastoralists.

I recently completed my PhD at Ghent University, titled Looking for land, finding people: Intimate governance and subalternity in Acholi, northern Uganda, which explored how people in Acholi access land and the mechanisms and dynamics of communal land ownership. This used data from my earlier work for the UN, but was mainly based on ethnographic material. My current research is digging down into the notion of intimate governance of communal landholdings, an auto-ethnographic co-production with a group of eight Acholi researchers who are also members of land holding groups; and I am still doing some work on magistrates’ courts, on mob justice and on mental health and resilience.

I have an adopted Acholi family, and in 2009 was given a plot of around 10 hectares on a collective landholding about 40 km north of Gulu, where this year some friends and I started a project trying to enthuse our neighbours on issues of sustainable resource use, producing and distributing (so far) around 10,000 tree seedlings.