My current book project, ‘I’ll never eat the sweat of another: The ethics and economics of masculine self-accomplishment in central Kenya’ examines the long-term effects of a process of ‘de-peasantization’ in central Kenya, its gendered and generational effects from an anthropological perspective. I study the transformation of a landscape of successful smallholder farmers in the 1960s into a contemporary landscape of masculine destitution. In an era of ‘surplus people’ – of mass unemployment, forcing the majority to ‘hustle’ for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy – my work explores masculine discourses about how to be an upstanding man within a world of male alcoholism, suicide and family breakdown. Looking at how an older generation of male farmers moralises about the importance of ‘hard work’, whilst the young wonder if they will ever ‘make it’ to a ‘stable’ status, my book looks at the economic struggles of rural families trying to achieve economic stability within a wider landscape of precarity. The research draws upon over 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork on Nairobi’s peri-urban outskirts where I lived in a ‘localised patriline’ of post-peasant families, exploring the struggles my interlocutors face as they try to achieve a ‘good life’, epitomised by a successful patriarchal household, within what they experience as a world of runaway greed, alcoholism and self-destruction.
Outside of my research on masculinity and morality, I have a long-standing interest in Kenya’s politics, and have published pieces in respected African Studies journals on Kenya’s 2017 elections, exploring the salience of ethno-nationalist alliances (Journal of Modern African Studies) and moral debates over patronage (Journal of Eastern African Studies).
My experience conducting research adjacent to Nairobi has also informed an interest in the city, and over the last four years I have worked with a team of scholars to curate Nairobi Becoming, an innovative, multi-authored ethnography of the city featuring the work of scholars, writers and artists from Kenya and Europe.
I am an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, where I have convened seminars on the anthropology of kinship over the past two years, as well as supervising undergraduates on a wide range of themes across social anthropology.
I have also contributed to wider debates about economic life within Kenya’s public sphere itself, publishing a piece in online newspaper The Elephant about a recent banking scandal in Kenya, generating major discussion online.
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Monograph
Edited volumes
Journal articles
Book chapters
Other publications and outputs (selected)