Postdoctoral Research

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History Department at Princeton University where I am looking at intersections between inherited struggles and ‘hustling’ as future-making.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel (between February and August 2024) where I began preparing my doctoral thesis for publication. 

Doctoral Research

 

My PhD in African Studies at the University of Basel, "The Politics and Poetics of Climate Change in South Africa and Nigeria" (2024), approached contemporary art and literature as alternate sources of climate knowledge in South Africa and Nigeria. Epistemic injustice in climate change research was a key theme throughout the five peer-reviewed papers, submitted as a cumulative dissertation. The thesis drew on climate science and comparative politics, visual and literary studies, environmental history, and anthropology of art.

I argued first that the two countries provide an opportunity to investigate differing discursive dimensions of climate politics; and second, that focusing on issues of form, or poetics, offers an opportunity to understand how the political can be constituted through different means. Since the political is constituted through hermeneutic processes (meaning-making); contemporary art and literature can expand the frameworks within which we attend to the vulnerability of those who inhabit environments threatened by climate change and the vulnerability of those environments themselves.  The thesis disrupts assumptions about what counts as climate knowledge, calling attention to the conceptual resources employed to make sense of that knowledge and investigating contemporary art and literature as forms of climate knowledge.