London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Department Member, Global Health and Development

About

I hold a BA (Hons) in Modern History and French from Oxford University. My undergraduate dissertation focused on the contemporary Francophone African crime novel and the urban uncanny. In 2007 I completed a Masters in Health, Community and Development at the London School of Economics where I conducted research on dementia and spousal care in East London. My research interests include care, gender, kinship and technology, emotional geographies, translational research, and ethnographies of expertise.

My recently completed PhD ‘Intimacy, Technoscience and the City: Regulating “Prostitution” in Dakar 1946-2010’ explores the postcolonial history of the sanitary regulation of commercial sex work in Dakar. Senegal is one of the very few former French colonies that legally regulated prostitution after independence; in Senegal, the legal status of sex work turns on a distinction between registered “avowed” prostitutes, and non-registered, unofficial prostitutes – the clandestines. The sanitary regulation of prostitution is closely associated with authoritarian, colonial rule. In Africa sanitary legislation such as the despised “open-your-legs” exam in colonial Zambia was frequently deployed to prevent or dissuade African women from entering the “European” colonial cities. It is perhaps surprising, then, that sanitary regulation is still on the statute books in contemporary Senegal and that those urban Senegalese women who engage in “venal sexualities” are subject to a set of laws that have their origins in nineteenth century Paris.

My research attempted to explain the survival of this policy in twentieth century Dakar, examining how the prostitute subject is placed in the games of truth of two knowledge cultures: biomedical research and NGO ethnography. Blending cultural history, feminist theory and science and technology studies I examined how forms of racial, gender, and class differences are produced through the diverse practices of sanitary regulation, asking what kind of feminist biopolitics might help to theorise the surprising social life of Dakar’s clinics.

I am currently teaching media, cultural theory and research methods at Middlesex University.

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