About Me

I'm a scholar-practitioner, policy researcher, and strategist whose work examines how education and migration governance shape the lives of people and communities across Africa and the African diaspora. I'm particularly interested in how governance is exercised through laws and policies, administrative systems, institutional practices, resource allocation, and implementation—and how these processes shape people’s ability to move through the world, experience belonging, and access the resources and opportunities they need to thrive. 

Positionality

My scholarship is shaped by a conviction that institutions are never abstract. Policies, educational systems, borders, labor markets, housing systems, and public programs organize the conditions under which people live, move, belong, and imagine what is possible for themselves.

I approach these questions not only as a researcher, but as someone whose own life has unfolded across many of the systems I study. I am a working-class Black diasporic scholar whose experiences of migration, education, public institutions, economic precarity, and institutional belonging have continually complicated the distance between researcher and subject. I have studied systems from archives and scholarly texts, worked within them as an educator, federal employee, policy researcher, and consultant, and navigated them personally as someone whose life has also been shaped by their possibilities, contradictions, and limits.

These experiences influence the questions I ask and the forms of evidence I take seriously. I am especially interested in the knowledge produced by people who must learn institutions in order to survive them: migrants navigating borders and bureaucracies, students making lives within educational systems, workers negotiating insecurity and exploitation, and communities developing knowledge and strategies in response to policies impacting them that were made without them and their expertise. I understand lived experience not as a substitute for rigorous research, but as one source of insight that can sharpen our attention to questions that institutional records and conventional scholarship may overlook.

My work therefore moves between archives and communities, scholarship and policy, historical inquiry and contemporary systems. Across these spaces, I am interested in how Black people have navigated structures they did not create while producing knowledge, building relationships, imagining political alternatives, and creating possibilities for living otherwise.