Habshis—people of African descent in early modern India—are best known as military slaves in the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan region, a handful of whom rose to political prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars argue that, unlike the alienation that characterized Atlantic African slave diasporas, military slavery encouraged...
In his 1971 inaugural speech, the Asantehene (King of Asante), Opoku Ware II, proposed the reconstruction of the traditional Asante palace, which was demolished in 1874 when the British colonial forces attacked the “national” capital, Kumase. The aftermath of the attack witnessed the British attempt to alter and reinvent the...
In this current historical moment, with the increase in globalized inequity and with the intensification of decolonial efforts, I argue for “pluriversal” orientations towards development discourses wherein people are “de-linked” from inherently damaging comparisons (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). To these ends, I interrogate the intersections of discourse, social structure, and...
This presentation is concerned with how return migrants articulate and experience belonging within faith communities in Accra. Focusing on Christian women, the paper investigates how interlocutors traverse ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of Pentecostal/Charismatic practice in Accra. In it, I discuss their connection to Hope City Church, parsing out the relationships...
This paper will focus on fashion and body aesthetics in Vodu religious spaces. African fashion is often limited to the glitz of runways shows, urban dandies and flashy fashion weeks. This sums up the unresolved dialogue of decolonizing the aesthetics of African fashion. Colonialism and an interplay of post-colonial modernity...
This paper considers the planning of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, in the late 1970s as a site of global knowledge production about urbanism that cut across the Global North and South. The planning of Abuja presented an unprecedented opportunity to international teams of planners to experiment with environmental city planning and...
Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...
Forecasting U.S. elections has been a field of interest for many researchers, with various statistical and mathematical models being proposed. In my research, I analyzed a prior election model, the SIS election model. In this model, a system of differential equations traditionally used in epidemiology to study disease transmission (but...
Lack of access to safe drinking water is a global problem, and methods to reliably and easily detect contaminants could be transformative. We report the development of a cell-free in vitro transcription system that uses RNA Output Sensors Activated by Ligand Induction (ROSALIND) to detect contaminants in water. A combination...
Numbers are not simply measurements. Often mobilized to support a certain political narrative, numbers contain underlying assumptions about what is important and how the world works. This is especially true when measures address public health issues. My project compares how numbers are politicized in two recent global health crises —...
Sexual minority individuals are at increased risk for negative health outcomes relative to heterosexual individuals (Meyer, 2003), and accumulating evidence indicates experience the greatest burden (for a review, see Feinstein & Dyar, 2017). These health disparities are due, in large part, to stigma-related stressors (e.g., discrimination; Meyer), and bisexual individuals...
How do you map a rebellion, especially when its participants do not want to be seen? Between British colonization in the 18th century and emancipation in 1834, Dominica presented a number of slave and Maroon rebellions. This mapping project considered the First Maroon War (1785-86), the New Year’s Day Revolt...
Many theories of categorization have included an intuitive role for our ability to detect and judge similarity. Yet, this important role of similarity processing has been disputed. This research adopts a model of similarity processing through structure mapping (Gentner, 1983) to explore its role in similarity processing and categorization. Relational...
Spatiotemporal dynamics of EEG/MEG (electro-/magneto-encephalogram) have typically been investigated by applying time-frequency decomposition and examining amplitude-amplitude, phase-phase, or phase-amplitude associations between combinations of frequency bands and scalp sites, primarily to identify neural correlates of behaviors and traits. Instead, we directly extracted global EEG spatiotemporal dynamics as trajectories of k-dimensional state...