Current Institutional Affiliation
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of California / Irvine

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2014
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Anthropology, Yale University
Cosmopolitan Terror: Secular Imaginaries, Transnational Governance, and the Security State in Urban Kenya

My research explores the ethical and political subjectivities of Kenyan Muslims as they grapple with their nation's entanglement in the 'war on terror.' Working in a range of leadership capacities (parliament, NGOs, media) urban middle class Kenyan Muslims are torn between daring to challenge controversial state practices of counter-terrorism on the one hand, and invoking the very discourses of security that reinforce state-sanctioned violence on the other. Deploying an ethnographic lens to cosmopolitan spaces of politics and public engagement in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, I will examine how socially invoked categories of 'moderate' and 'radical' Islam emerge in relation to contemporary forms of state-craft, historical memory, and transnational governance to shape new understandings of religion, politics, and violence.

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