My research has explored lived experiences of marginality and dispossession, the politics of city-building and large-scale demolition, architecture and professional ethics, authoritarianism, activism, work, the street economy and everyday forms of resistance.  I have conducted long-term fieldwork on processes of urban change in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Birmingham (United Kingdom), as well as smaller-scale research projects on Ethiopian migration in Washington, DC (USA), housing and architecture in Lagos (Nigeria), and anti-mafia activism in Naples (Italy). My work as anthropologist has revolved around interrogating the kinds of knowledge needed to imagine and realise more just urban futures. Central to my research is to experiment with how scholarship can understand, theorise but also effect processes of urban change, bridging the gap between critical inquiry and transformative urban practice. The goal of my research is not to merely provide a critique of actualities of injustice, dispossession and exclusion in cities, but to explore how cities could be otherwise and in ways that communities recognise as just.

My first book, The Act of Living. Street life, Marginality and Development in urban Ethiopia, published in 2019 with Cornell University Press, explores the relations between economic growth and experiences of marginality in inner city Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. By documenting how the biographies of two street hustlers intertwine with Ethiopia’s history, this book investigates why development continues to fail the poor, how marginality is understood and acted upon in a time of promise and why poor people’s claims for open-endedness can constitute the grounds on which to imagine better and more just alternative futures.

My second book, Unjust Developments, forthcoming with Fordham University Press, examines growth, marginality and urban inequalities, this time from the perspective of city builders shaping processes of urban change in Addis Ababa: architects, planners, policymakers, “experts”, contractors, and real estate developers. This new book shows that city builders’ understandings of their roles and moral responsibilities as mainly revolving around equipping the city with modern infrastructure has failed to make them responsive to the claims and demands of construction workers for better working conditions, and those of inner-city residents against eviction and for affordable housing. By situating the analysis of injustice into an appreciation of the tensions between responsiveness and professional practice, Unjust Developments is a reminder that moral, lawful, and ethical action does not guarantee justice. The persistence and deepening of injustice, as well as the emergence of alternative visions of urban development during a construction boom, are a product of how city builders navigate the tensions encompassing their practice and, notably, relate to the urban poor’s claims and demands for a more just and fairer city.

Since October 2023, I have initiated a new research project that provides a comparative and ethnographic exploration of the resurgence of large-scale demolition as a technology of urban development and the search for urban alternatives that communities have mounted in response. So far, research activities have focused on Addis Ababa and Birmingham, where large-scale demolitions of thousands of homes have been planned or initiated with little to no involvement of urban communities. My work examines the multiple forms of community resistance to demolition—not only as acts of defiance but also as sites of knowledge production. Residents’ struggles expose contradictions in demolition-driven development while proposing alternative visions of community, collaboration, and participation—foundational for imagining just urban futures locally and globally. 

Before joining DASA in September 2018, I held research and teaching positions at the London School of Economics, and the universities of Brussels, Sussex, Addis Ababa, Lagos and Oxford, where I also completed my doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2012. I am the founder and co-ordinating editor of Otherwise Magazine, a magazine of ethnographic writing and storytelling.