I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Politics, and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Working at the intersection of the history of science, science and technology studies, and critical migration and border studies, I examine the socio-political implications and historical antecedents of digital identity and biometric systems. I am particularly interested in how biometric infrastructures shape the lives of minoritized citizens and non-citizens. I have almost two decades of experience conducting archival research and fieldwork (including oral history) in Kenya.

My interest in historical and biometric identification systems evolved out of research for my  first book, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya, which was a finalist for the 2018 African Studies Association (U.S.) Book Prize for best scholarly work on Africa. I am now working on a new book project, tentatively entitled Fingerprint of Empire, which weaves together multi-sited archival research and fieldwork. Using Kenya as its lens, this project examines how the "unidentified" became an object of global concern and care in recent decades. It looks at Kenya’s fraught history with fingerprinting, which was first introduced by British colonial authorities in the early twentieth century. The project asks: How are those at the geographic and metaphorical margins of the nation, who have historically struggled to access identification documents, navigating the digital identity turn?

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I am also interested in the relationship between biometric systems, climactic crisis, and scarcity. Studying technologies like biometrics—which mediate people’s access to resources, services, and freedoms likely to become scarcer and more unequally distributed in the coming decades—allows us to think critically about the risks, possibilities, and pressing challenges of post-growth and post-carbon economies. This includes the future of migration and the politics of social welfare, rationing, and redistribution in an age of ecological and environmental breakdown. More recently, I have also been exploring questions of digital sovereignty with a team of interdisciplinary researchers.

In recent years, I have worked on projects for civil society organizations like Amnesty International, Privacy International, and Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which have explored the rights of refugees in the digital age; the growing use of digital technologies for border and immigration enforcement; and the use of biometrics in the humanitarian sector and counterterrorism industry. I am also an advisory board member and active volunteer at the Haki na Sheria Initiative, a civil society organization based in Garissa, Kenya.

 

I occasionally appear in the media. I have been cited in/interviewed for The New York Times, Quartz Africa, The Washington Post, BBC News, and BBC World Service.

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