I graduated in the spring of 2011 with a 4-year Honours degree in Women's & Gender Studies and a 4-year degree in Conflict Resolution Studies. I started my Masters at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's & Gender Studies at Carleton University in September 2011 and have completed coursework primarily focused on transnational and postcolonial feminism and critical race studies. The working title of my thesis is “Constructing Whiteness and Locating Power in East Africa: Racialization, Desirability and Status of ‘Others’ with Access.”

I recently spent four months in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania conducting nineteen in-depth interviews with black Kenyan and Tanzanian men and white Western women involved in international development. My thesis considers how these women are understood to be desirable to black East African men because of their perceived access to finances, social status and a mythological ‘better life’ somewhere else.

I hope to continue my interest in the intersection between race, sexuality and (post)colonial structures at the PhD level, extending an idea that surfaced during my MA research. I want to interrogate the ways in which, compared to people of other Western countries, Canadians are considered to be moral, virtuous and “good wazungu” (white people in Swahili). I seek to destabilize the construction of this hegemonic Canadian national narrative and its performance through acts of 'doing good' in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular the ways in which morality is structured as an essential performance as Canadians overseas struggle to uphold, fulfill and embody normative standards of race and sexuality.