Photo: Safe OUTside the System's Community Freestyle, SM wearing black hat, facilitating a workshop on violence de-escalation, Brooklyn, NY, 2018

  Research overview

Most of my research questions how social location informs mobilizations against criminalization. More specifically, how African Diasporic people and organizations negotiate and resist the concept, application and aftermath of criminal or deviant labeling in urban centers. 

I explore various issues affecting queer people of African descent, to find diagnostic and reparative connections that can transform our multi-sited criminalization. My current research continues this focus on transformative justice as a response to criminalization, with particular focus on the role of (largely queer) women of color as the progenitors of the abolitionist movement in the United States. In 2018, I began a project on penal abolition called Abolition in the Academy: The Role of Academia in the Growing Movement for Penal Abolition in which I interviewed dozens of abolitionists in seven countries. This project will explain how social location informs the academic activism shaping this transnational network. For the completion of this project, I am grateful to have recently accepted the AAUW American Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-21).  

From 2011-2017, I focused on Kampala, Uganda and the state's mobilization of the framework that homosexuality is “unAfrican” or the product of Western cultural importation. This was done in order to criminalize and deter the popularization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or kuchu self-identification. In my first monograph, The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational LGBTI Organizing in Uganda (Lexington Books, 2019), I use the ethnographic research to highlight the effects of transnational advocacy on Ugandan organizing during the period in which the Ugandan government was considering the “Kill the Gays Bill.” 

  recent Publications