In collaboration with Adey Mohamed, a Kenyan-Canadian social worker and PhD candidate in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba, I am working on an experimental ethnography based on research carried out over several years with African refugee and immigrant teens and young adults about their everyday lives in their new home city of Winnipeg and their stories of settlement. The research was funded by a Community-Engaged Research on HIV/AIDS Research Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research under the project title, “What Risk? Whose Voices? An Intervention of ‘Risk’ of HIV/AIDS through a Participatory Ethnographic Project with African Immigrant and Refugee Youth in Winnipeg, Canada.” In the book project Adey and I will experiment with ethnographic fiction and poetry to capture, we hope, the vitalities in the youths’ lives and everyday processes of settlement and integration. Vitalities of settlement were also punctuated with anti-black and anti-Muslim racism and surveillance as our interlocuters navigated a complex inner-city geography and inhabited corporeal spaces of whiteness and settler colonial control over their bodies as potentially “risky subjects” at risk both of contracting and spreading HIV. 

Research Collaborators

The research would not have been possible with our partnership with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba and the Sexuality Education Resource Centre, Winnipeg.