About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. I hold a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Newcastle, Australia.

My research focuses on the key question: What does it mean to be displaced in an increasingly destabilized world?

While my research largely focuses on refugee resettlement, humanitarianism, and social reproduction, I consider displacement to be a condition that is not defined by a politico-legal status. Displacement is a sense of dislocated or fractured future. It is an increasingly ubiquitous condition, and it is also deeply rooted in racialized histories of coloniality. I argue that displacement is not new or exceptional, despite the growing number of refugees, migrants, and people on the move worldwide. Recognizing the broad scope of displacement and the longitudinal scales across which it works enables us to identify new bases of solidarity.

I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with resettled refugees in Australia; urban refugees in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda; refugees in Nakivale refugee settlement in Uganda; resettled refugees in the United States; people experiencing homelessness in the United States; people impacted by extractive industries in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; and most recently with Afghan refugees who were brought to the United States as part of the airlift that followed the US withdrawal and fall of the Afghanistan government to the Taliban. These diverse ethnographic entry points reveal important points of common experience as people attempt to navigate uncertain futures with diminishing resources.

My most recent project is an ethnographic film produced with my collaborator, Andrew Cambron. Driven follows the experiences of Ali, a refugee from Afghanistan, as he moves through trucking school with the goal of attaining a Commercial Drivers License. The film explores the paradox of refuge, where the promise of security and stability is a constantly evolving target. I am also completing a book exploring new formations of humanitarianism in the context of emergent authoritarianism.

My 2018 book, Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures (Routledge), sets out a temporal theory of displacement that challenges the common sense conflation of displacement with refugees. Building on this work, I have published articles and have papers forthcoming in Current Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Public Culture, Critique of Anthropology, Environment and Planning, Refugee Survey Quarterly among others. I have also published widely in public media outlets, including Slate, The Conversation, and Arena.

I am the former Co-Editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review and the Co-Editor of the book series, Worlds in Crisis, through Indiana University Press.

As a migrant myself, I approach the question of displacement, and the systems that produce it, as an insider-outsider. I am increasingly drawn to projects that challenge the field/home binary, since it is no longer a reality for me to think with those categories as I navigate my own structural and emotional challenges as a person living away from their family and outside their country of birth. I find insights into the political conditions of humanity amongst the relationships I develop with other migrants in my local neighborhoods, and through ongoing relations and solidity with them I hope to situate my research work within meaningful movements towards justice, repair, and human flourishing.