Ideas

There are two strands to my work. The first is non-state actors, primarily NGOs and recently companies, and how such private entities create public authority to act. This was the basis of my doctoral research and my forthcoming monograph: Legitimation as Political Practice: Crafting Everyday Authority in Tanzania (CUP 2022). I am interested in where state and non-state actors coproduce particular effects, what I term the non/state, where practices, practicalities and people overlap and become enmeshed. Recent work began to explore the Chinese non/state in east Africa.

The second is the negotiation of the non/state in everyday life. In Tanzania, I interviewed NGO volunteers, effectively conscripted via the state to undertake unpaid community work. This is the basis of my Wellcome Trust grant: 'Recruited, Mobilized, Conscripted? Leveraging community health work, citizenship and public authority in northern Kenya' and new RSE grant 'Voluntarism and State-Making in Africa'. I employ a critical approach to volunteer recruitment / promotion by global health agencies, NGOs and the state, as well as extended ethnographic fieldwork, to understand how voluntary labour is negotiated today. Prior to this grant, I explored forms of public participation within the UK's NHS.