I am a Senior Scientist and PI of the project Inhabiting Climate Change: Re-Locative Practices and Politics in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Prior to joining UZH, I was the Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where I chaired the Pedagogy Committee and coordinated the MA in Critical Urbanisms. I am the author of the book Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC published by Indiana University Press in 2025. In 2022, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Chair of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Before beginning an academic career in Switzerland, I worked as a Research Associate for the Institute for International Urban Development (I2UD), a not-for-profit institution dedicated to improving urban environments for vulnerable communities by providing research on spatial development issues, advisory services to city leaders, and urban planning education programs. With colleagues at I2UD, I co-authored numerous policy and research reports for the World Bank, UN-Habitat, IOM, and the International Institute for Environment and Development. I have held various consultant positions with the OECD, the UNESCO-based International Association of Universities, and Co-PLAN Institute for Habitat Development.

I have a PhD in Social Anthropology and Urban Studies from the University of Basel; an MSc from Sciences Po Paris in Urban Governance, Policy and Planning; and a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Political Science and International Studies with a Certificate in African Studies.

I am an urban anthropologist and theorist who combines methods in ethnography and critical geography to explore the place-personhood relationships and lived experiences of people who experience different kinds of displacements and relocations on the African continent. My current research project examines urban fisherfolks’ lived experiences of climate re-location and interrogates how re-location unfolds and is practiced on a day-to-day basis by various institutional actors in Saint Louis, Senegal. I also continue to write and think with members of the Sustainable Housing in Urban Humanitarian Crises project [Spirit Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation].

Past Projects

• 2023-2024: Resettlement, Dwelling, and Urbanization in Secondary African Cities: Extractive Displacement in Tanga, Tanzania and Climate Refuge in Saint-Louis, Senegal [University of Basel Research Fund for Excellent Junior Scholars & Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft (FAG) Basel]
• 2020-2022: Making Infrastructure Global? Design and Governance of Infrastructural Expansion in the Global South [EUCOR Seed Money Grant]
• 2016-2020: Making the City: Agency, Urbanity and Urbanisation in Ordinary Cities [Swiss National Science Foundation]

In Fall 2026, I am teaching GEO 722 Transborder Urbanism at the University of Zurich.

At the University of Basel from 2020 to 2026, I convened and taught course courses for MA and PhD students on interdisciplinary methods in urban studies, theory in urban studies, emergency urbanism, and the settlement typology of the camp. In 2024 and 2025, I coordinated the Urbanism across Geographies study track in Kenya and its corollary, collaborative research project Lamufutures, which brought together student researchers from the University of Basel and the Lamu Youth Alliance. I continue to supervise MA students as Affiliated Faculty at Urban Studies, University of Basel.

My teaching philosophy is underpinned by playful pedagogies and collaborative rigor in both instruction and learning.