I am a literary and cultural studies scholar with a focus on African and African diasporic literature. Over time, I have taken great interest in non-canonical literature. I became motivated to study people’s worldview using forms of knowledge that are otherwise excluded from mainstream discourse, basing on the widespread belief that such forms of knowledge are unscientific, unreliable, and insignificant. To this end, I centre embodied and experiential knowledge in my work. I gain this knowledge through interviews that I conduct with members of the communities with whom I work, mostly on the Kenyan coast. Most of my texts are therefore oral texts which depart from the canonical, written, Europhone histories of the East African coast and the large body of Europhone literary texts that have followed in their wake. I use these locally produced knowledges to challenge the over-reliance on singular and exclusionary epistemic practices and to argue for pluriversalist modes of creating and disseminating knowledge. Fieldwork methodology has exposed me to practices and methods that are interdisciplinary in nature, and this has slowly shaped my research into an interdisciplinary endeavor. My work is broadly located at the borders of literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology.

The people I interview from time to time are fishers, sailors, divers and beach operators on the Kenyan coast. I also work closely with indigenous knowledge experts and “custodians” of collective community knowledge, and these are oral historians and orators in general. One of my research agenda is a focus on marine ecosystems and oceanic lifeworlds from a sociological and literary perspective – in which I probe how indigenous knowledges of the sea capture changes in the ocean and explore how indigenous knowledges carried in local art forms aid marine conservation. Using knowledge I gain from interviews with seafarers, my research has shifted analyses of the sea from surface to depth in line with recent trends in oceanic studies.

I see Global Encounters as a melting pot of researchers from diverse backgrounds, who belong to varied disciplines and use different methodologies to answer pertinent questions that, taken together, build a constellation of global epistemologies. This constellation is inclusive and validates rather than disqualifies multiple ways of knowing.