Research

I am a cultural anthropologist that researches the human side of wildlife conservation in Africa.

I fell in love with cultural anthropology, a discipline that studies the social side of what it is to be human. It dives into the texture of things—the parts of life that cannot be quantified or tested. We focus on specific contexts and groups of people and ask things like what it is to be in love or to grieve? What does justice look like? Or, how was childhood was forever changed during the pandemic? While research topics can vary widely they are connected by how anthropologists  answer our questions about the world. Our main method is “participant observation.” It’s a clunky term for being “in it,” for participating in and experiencing what you want to understand.

For nearly a decade, I’ve studied the illegal wildlife trade, the lives of orphaned chimpanzees, and the humans that care for them.

I carried out two years of participant observation in two of Cameroon’s great ape sanctuaries and did a shorter stint with an international wildlife law enforcement agency. At the sanctuaries I worked 14-hour days alongside directors, managers, staff, and volunteers from all over the world. I helped raise six infant chimps and formed enduring friendships with the adult chimps and humans. I wrote fieldnotes at night and fit in nearly 100 interviews with the humans to answer these questions:  

Care
What does it mean to “care” about someone or something?

Species
How do the immense similarities and vast differences between the two species and complicate humans’ attempts to care for orphaned chimps at the sanctuary, and protect those still living in the wild?

Social Media & the Wildlife Trade
How is social media reshaping the illegal wildlife trade?  What can conservationists do to fight emerging threats in the online world?

Race & Conservation
Wildlife conservation has a complicated racial history around the world. How are notions of race both challenged and reaffirmed in Cameroon’s sanctuaries and what might that mean for conservation in Africa in the years to come?

I’m currently working on a book project on this research.