I am a socio-cultural anthropologist, writing and researching at the intersection of anthropology, intellectual history and economic thought. 

My primary PhD project, supported by an ESRC studentship, interrogates changing imaginaries and practices of solidarity in contemporary Senegal. In particular, I am focusing on a set of state initiatives seeking to promote and formalise the “social and solidarity economy”: i.e. cooperatives and other forms of (largely female) collective enterprise. Through ethnographic engagement with the various actors involved - from bureaucrats, academics and activists to informal groupings of female producers/vendors and the musicians who animate their life-cycle ceremonies - I explore the competing meanings these interventions take on in a wider context of contestation around economic justice, neo-colonialism and gender relations. My MRes research proposal (qualifying paper) for this project received the Alfred Gell Prize.

 Alongside this ethnographic study, I am currently pursuing two complementary strands of research, supported by an Economy of Francesco Fellowship. The first explores the work of several lesser-known Senegalese intellectuals, from the 1930s to the present, considering in particular their distinctive engagements with anthropological theories and methods. As well as illuminating the ways in which anthropology shaped the approaches of these authors to political, economic and religious questions, this project asks how their works might invite us to think differently about anthropology itself, and in particular its relationship with African societies. Forthcoming publications emerging from this research include chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Decolonisation (eds. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni et al., 2025) and in For a Social Ecological Transformation starting from Laudato si (ed. Raul Buffo, 2025). 

The second explores more broadly the relationship between anthropology and various “heterodox” schools of economic thought. I am convinced that a closer dialogue between these different intellectual traditions would be mutually beneficial in analytical terms, as well as highly relevant to the broader struggle for a ‘human economy’, directed towards human wellbeing rather than merely material abundance. Recent publications based on this strand of research include a paper in the Review of Political Economy entitled ‘Oikos and Surplus: The Search for an Anthropological Economics’ (2025). 

My undergraduate training was at Cambridge, where I completed my BA in Social Anthropology in 2012 and produced a dissertation based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kinshasa. I subsequently received an Entente Cordiale scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies in Paris, where I was a visiting student at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Ulm), and obtained a Masters in Social Science (concentration Social Anthropology) at the EHESS in 2014. Prior to starting my MRes/PhD at the LSE, I worked for eight years in community organising, policy advice and research, publishing widely on alternative approaches to economic development and industrial strategy. Most recently I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) in Manchester, where among other projects I served as the director of the Liverpool City Region Land Commission. Publications from this research include “A ‘return to normal times’? Industrial Strategy and Reproductive Labour”, part of an edited volume on The Political Economy of Industrial Strategy in the UK (eds. Craig Berry, Julie Froud and Tom Barker, 2021).

I have taught in a variety of contexts, most recently including the University of Cambridge, where I have contributed to teaching undergraduate courses on the Anthropology of Social Justice and Development, African Politics, and the Sociology of Racism, “Race” and Ethnicity. I have also been a guest lecturer at the Architectural Association. Committed to a “public” anthropology reaching beyond university settings, I am involved with a number of broader educational activities. As a visiting artist and educator with Numbi Arts, a leading African diasporic arts organisation based in East London, I have worked with local young people to explore and perform various diasporic musical styles, and to develop walking tours exploring the histories of migrant communities. I have also facilitated workshops on environmental and feminist economics with young activists in Senegal.