Anthropology

Daniel is a Ph.D. candidate and public health researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Brown. Drawing from medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies, his research investigates the evolution of development and governance in East Africa. His dissertation project, currently titled “Decolonial Enlightenment: Remaking Health and Development in Post-Aid Nairobi,” examines how Pan-African health professionals are working to mitigate disaster and build African health sovereignty in the wake of largest cuts to international aid in history. He does this through immersive ethnographic work in Nairobi, Kenya, particularly at the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)—one of the continent's largest and most renowned African-run, African-led health research, policy, and intervention institutions. Through following and participating efforts to “Africanize” their technoscientific practices and “decolonize” the development of health infrastructures, he seeks to understand how ideas of progress and development are being reconfiguring while documenting how the “post aid era” of Africa is much more complex than just death and despair. His ongoing research is funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and has been supported by the Population Studies Training Center and the Watson School for International and Public Affairs, both at Brown University.

In addition to his dissertation project, Daniel is also examining the role of public health workers who use their science for the advancement of social rebellions in Africa. Working with social justice centers, mutual aid groups, and spontaneous organizations of young public health workers in Nairobi during the #RejectFinanceBill uprisings, he is investigating how epidemiology and public health thinking evolve as they are used to document and publicize state violence within protest.

A third project in completion concerns the linguistic dynamics of “decolonizing global health” in the United States. Using data collected from elite schools of public health, he is finishing articles that explore the language ideologies and discursive politics of “decolonization” as a window into how signs and discourse developed in Black, revolutionary, and other insurgent spaces are co-opted into hegemonic structures.

Daniel’s scholarly work has been published in Social Science and Medicine, The Lancet, BMJ Global Health, and many others. He serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Systems Development at Amref International University in Nairobi. You can read and learn more about his work here.

Previous Degrees

• BA Anthropology, Middlebury College, 2021
• MSPH International Health, Johns Hopkins University, 2023