About me
I am a social anthropologist, researcher and advisor whose work explores questions of gender, violence, health and intergenerational justice.
My approach is grounded in long-term ethnographic research in Rwanda with young people conceived as a result of conflict-related sexual violence, exploring questions of identity, belonging, intergenerational harm and the long afterlives of conflict. This research continues to shape how I think about policy and practice: with close attention to lived experience, social worlds, and what may remain unseen by institutions and conventional forms of evidence.
My current research at the University of Amsterdam extends this intergenerational lens to questions of health and care in contexts of displacement. Working with pregnant women and mothers with refugee backgrounds in Greece, the research explores forms of informal and often invisible care, and how they may alleviate stress and support the health and wellbeing of women and their children.
Alongside my academic work, I have more than a decade of experience working across research, policy and practice with NGOs, UN agencies and community-based organisations. My work has spanned sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence prevention, youth participation, mental health and psychosocial support, and more recently technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
Across these different settings, I return to a common set of questions: What happens beyond the immediate intervention? Whose knowledge counts? What becomes invisible when complex realities are translated into programmes and policies? And how can research contribute to responses that are not only effective, but thoughtful, ethical and attentive to the people whose lives they seek to affect?
I am particularly interested in:
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how violence and inequality reverberate across generations and systems
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how organisations can respond to harm without reproducing it
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how young people and communities can participate and advocate on their own terms
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how care, safety and belonging are created and sustained in complex environments, including in contexts of displacement and environmental change
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how research can bridge lived experience, policy and practice
I work independently and collaboratively, and I am particularly interested in partnerships that make space for curiosity, reflection and long-term thinking alongside the pressure to act.
Current Research
My current research explores how experiences of violence, displacement and care shape people’s lives over time and across generations. I am particularly interested in what formal systems make visible - and what they overlook - and the consequences this has for care, recognition and intergenerational health and justice.
Invisible Care
My postdoctoral research at the University of Amsterdam examines the forms of care and support surrounding pregnant women and mothers of newborns with a refugee background in Greece that often remain invisible within formal systems of humanitarian and healthcare provision.
Through ethnographic research in Athens and Lesvos, I explore how relational and everyday practices of care - from listening and accompaniment to practical support and social connection - shape maternal wellbeing and intergenerational health. The research also examines how humanitarian Monitoring & Evaluation systems determine which forms of care become visible, valued and funded, and which remain unrecognised despite their importance in women’s everyday lives.
Generation After
Generation After is my ongoing research on the intergenerational aftermaths of conflict-related sexual violence in Rwanda. Emerging from more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD, the research centres on young people conceived through rape during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
It explores how histories of violence reverberate through family relations and across generations, shaping experiences of identity, belonging and kinship, while also asking what dominant frameworks of post-conflict recovery and justice make visible — and what they leave out. At its heart are questions of intergenerational justice: what is carried forward after mass violence, whose experiences and needs are recognised, and what recognition and repair might mean for the generation after.