Research
My Book
I study how citizens engage with states and help make the content of citizenship through the formation and contestation of citizenship.
I call this ‘meaningful citizenship’ because it is not just the formality of having the documentation that the state provides or denies. Rather, it is the activities of being a citizen.
My book, Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender, and National Identity in Ethiopia, is now available on Amazon.
My research also considers the changes and continuities of human movement in East Africa by studying mixed migration. Informal and irregular migrants leaving Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia to seek better lives in the Middle East, transiting through Djibouti, as well as refugees and IDPs in the region meet en route and form a complex ecosystem of human movement.
State responses to migration have evolved considerably, particularly in light of incentives created by populist and anti-migration regimes in the global north. Women migrants in particular are invisible and increasingly mobile. Environmental concerns propel communities to send family members abroad as well.
