Omo-Turkana Research Network

My work focuses on colonialism and development efforts in Turkana in the 20^th century. As a historian, I combine archival research and oral history to explore questions of local agency in and perspectives on outside influences and development efforts. My research on development initiatives attempts to move beyond the labels of “success” and “failure” and instead investigates how interventions play out and formed new conditions for everyday life in local settings. I focus on how development interventions were negotiated locally, how the Turkana co-produced the projects through their actions and everyday practices, appropriating them, adapting them to local conditions, seizing opportunities, feeling constraints, rejecting the parts irreconcilable with their lifeworlds, and in turn how this contributed to a dynamic production and reproduction of local cultural and social structures. I have worked extensively with fishing communities along the western shores of Lake Turkana and cultivation communities along River Turkwell.