My doctoral research at the University of Cape Town uses ethnographic and archival methods to trace medical materialities, data regimes, AI, and the ethics of care across evolving health infrastructures in Zambia. The project builds on earlier work regarding childhood, developmental ordering, and healthcare in Zimbabwe. The research is part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, AI, and the ethics of care in Africa project, each of which has unique research questions across the continent.

My interest in anthropology began while pursuing my bachelor’s in social sciences at the University of Cape Town, where I read about the epistemologies of health in medical anthropology. Towards my honours and master’s in anthropology, I researched the intersections of tuberculosis and early childhood (the first 1000 days) in villages around Maphisa, a township in rural Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. Although I was raised in Bulawayo, I’ve known Maphisa since childhood, as my paternal roots lie there. However, I discovered through ethnography the multiple overlooked patterns pointing to a political economy, structural violence, and migration as fundamental factors contributing to the province’s high prevalence of tuberculosis. With a growing urban landscape in this rural area, I went deeper to contextualise how childhoods are constructed around fragmented urbanity and controversial development. I was fascinated by numerous non-governmental organisations dotted across Maphisa, all of which aimed to solve the persistent poverty. This led me to pursue a second master’s in cultural and development studies in Leuven, which unpacked the shortcomings of developmental paradigms in the Global South. A part of this program was fieldwork on the gentrification of Danseart, a chic and hipster district in Brussels, where development significantly differs from that in the developing community.

What might seem peripheral is, in fact, foundational. This background travels with me: its histories and assumptions fold into supportive technologies and are coded into the developmental models they enable and mobilise in practice. I arrived at my current research after two years in Brainport Eindhoven, working with cohorts of technologists, engineers, and business professionals to translate innovation into business. Among them are a capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer and a photocatalytic nanomaterial. Beyond hardware, AI is integral to Brabant’s industrial ecosystem, underpinning applications in healthcare and beyond. This material culture prompted me to ask what constitutes the human when our tools become constitutive. In African contexts marked by postcolonial inequality and fragmented infrastructure, where digital technology relies on the ubiquity of mobile phones, humanity is situated within and increasingly shaped by the materiality of digital infrastructures.

Reflecting on life in Southern Africa, I examine, through the lens of critical data studies, how code-based and data-driven technologies are situated within developmental paradigms and postcolonial modernisation projects. I trace how devices, data schemas, and platforms acquire cultural and social meanings that shape practice, sometimes reinforcing normative orders and at other times unsettling them. Centering maternal health, I analyse the platformisation of care: how clinics, households, and community actors are reorganised through spreadsheets, dashboards, and mobile interfaces that triage risk, ration attention, and encode ethical judgments. By focusing on adopted technologies that support healthcare, public health, and everyday care infrastructures, I aim to advance scholarship on the ethics of care and AI in the global South and inform the design of technologies responsive to this demographic. My multi-sited project spans three Zambian provinces—Lusaka, Southern (Siavonga), and the Copperbelt—and four archival repositories across Southern Africa, along with an applied partnership with technologists in the Netherlands (North Brabant). Across these sites, I combine archival and ethnographic inquiry to trace the historical chronologies of hospital and patient data and the contemporary platformisation of maternal care through spreadsheets, dashboards, and mobile tools and show how these infrastructures are reconfiguring ethics and practice.

This PhD is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award (a component of the African Critical Inquiry Programme), the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Max & Lillie Sonnenberg Scholarship, the French Institute of South Africa, and the Margaret McNamara Education Grant. In 2024, it became one of the Mozilla Foundation’s winning projects that examines AI’s relationship with African communities.

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Some formal milestones:

• 2021 – pres: University of Cape Town — Doctor of Philosophy, Anthropology. Title: Wired Wombs: Coding for Risk in Zambia’s Maternal Care

• 2018 – 2020: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven — Advanced Master of Sciences, Cultural and Development Studies

• 2015 – 2018: University of Cape Town — Master of Social Sciences, Anthropology

• 2016 – 2016: Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking — Foundations of Design Thinking

• 2014 – 2014: University of Cape Town — Bachelor of Social Sciences (Honours), Anthropology

• 2011 – 2013: University of Cape Town — Bachelor of Social Sciences, Sociology & Social Development