My forthcoming book, Of Rebels, Spirits, and Social Engineers: The Awkward Endings of Female Genital Cutting examines the logics and effects of surprisingly successful Ghanaian NGO interventions against cutting. This ethnography analyzes the shifting place of African activists and NGOs in international campaigns against cutting, the practices of making and using medical and cultural knowledge as techniques of intervention, NGO’s involvement in law-making and enforcement, and rural women’s reconfigurations of affect and meaning of cutting. Contrary to modernist assumption about knowledge and social engineering, these NGO interventions were successful because of their contingent and performative character as well as the NGOs’ misreadings of cultural forms and practices. I show that the larger effects of NGO governmentality include the reconfigurations of meaning, sovereignty, and global governance, and the emergence of popular critiques of precarity and legal violence.

My next project, Affective Encounters will examine the productive work of affect in forging global connections, and its circulation and commodification in the name of humanity. This project builds on long-standing ethnographic research on new forms of exchange and indebtedness emerging in the uneven terrain of transnational encounters of people engaged in development and humanitarian efforts in Ghana, human rights activism at Amnesty International, and immigrants’ and women’s rights activism in Germany.

Research and Teaching Interests

Critical medical anthropology (health activism and biopolitics, violence and social suffering, humanitarianism, science and medical knowledge, global health governance)

Transnational gender and sexuality studies (women’s movements, activism, feminist theory)

Legal and political anthropology (NGOs, human rights, development, law and politics beyond the state and at the margins of the state, sovereignty, migration, and citizenship)

Globalization

Intersections of postcolonial theory with ethnographic and feminist critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism.

Regional interests in Africa, esp. Ghana, and Europe.

On Ghanaian Women’s Rights Advocacy, NGOs, and Gender Violence

Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence, Gender Politics, and Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana. Ethnos 74(3): 331-360, 2009. www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a917948532~db=all~jumptype=rss

Full text available at: http://www.academia.edu/2470532/Unsettling_Power_Domestic_Violence_Gender_Politics_and_Struggles_over_Sovereignty_in_Ghana

Seduced by Information, Contaminated by Power: Women’s Rights as a Global Panopticon. Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women’s Rights, Human Lives. Debra Bergoffen et al., eds. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2011

Full text available at: http://www.academia.edu/2470548/Seduced_by_Information_Contaminated_by_Power_Womens_Rights_as_a_Global_Panopticon

The Logics of Controversy: Gender Violence as a Site of Frictions in Ghanaian Advocacy. Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Richard Roberts et al., eds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010

Full text available at:http://www.academia.edu/2470588/The_Logics_of_Controversy_Gender_Violence_as_a_Site_of_Frictions_in_Ghanaian_Advocacy

Feminist Bastards: Toward a Post-Humanist Critique of NGOization. The NGO Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds. Duke University Press. Forthcoming in 2013.

On Medical Knowledge, Biopolitics, and Global Health Governance

Ascertaining Deadly Harms: Aesthetics and Politics of Global Evidence. Cultural Anthropology. 28(1): 86–109, 2013

Full text available at: http://www.academia.edu/2519630/Ascertaining_Deadly_Harms_Aesthetics_and_Politics_of_Global_Evidence

Article website with classroom questions, relevant links, and author interview:

http://production.culanth.org/supplementals/232-ascertaining-deadly-harms-aesthetics-and-politics

On Violence

Of War, Culture, and Responsibility. Anthropology News. May 2007 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/an.2007.48.5.8/abstract

Full text available at:

http://www.academia.edu/2470714/Of_War_Culture_and_Responsibility

Book Review, Global Health in Times of Violence, Paul Farmer et al., Eds. Journal of Global Public Health 6(3): 678-680 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17441692.2011.589397

Full text available at:

http://www.academia.edu/2470665/Global_Health_in_Times_of_Violence_Book_Review

Proseminar in Anthropology

Gender, Liberalism, and Postcolonial Theory

Sex and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

New Courses: A Global Controversy: Anthropology of a Human Rights Violation, Politics Beyond the State: Activism, Advocacy, and NGOs

With Lucinda Ramberg, I co-organize an interdisciplinary workshop on Science, Medicine, and the Body with participants from across Cornell. We meet two-three times a semester and discuss one participant’s precirculated work in progress at each meeting. Interested faculty and advanced graduate students from Cornell and nearby colleges/universities may join at any time by emailing us.

With Sandra Green, I co-organize an interdisciplinary social science in Africa workshop; our theme in 2012-13 is The State in Africa. We meet three times a semester and discuss the agreed upon readings. Interested faculty and graduate students from Cornell and nearby colleges/universities may join at any time by emailing us.