Kathy works at the intersection between Global Politics, Political Ethnography, Development and the Medical Humanities. Her two key areas of expertise are non-state actors and voluntary labour in development, with a recent interest in the unwaged production of data for development.

Kathy completed her PhD in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh in 2018 on the legitimation practices of NGOs in Tanzania. Two years in Edinburgh's Usher Institute followed, examining public participation in the NHS, before being awarded her Wellcome Trust fellowship in 2021. She remains an honorary fellow at Edinburgh, is a Mercator Fellow at The University of Bayreuth and previously a Research Associate at the University of Nairobi.

Research

• Voluntarism and voluntary labour
• Non-state actors
• Global politics of health
• Community health
• Chinese non-state actors in east Africa
• NHS

There are two strands to Kathy's work. The first is non-state actors - NGOs and now companies - and how they create the public authority to act. She is interested in where state and non-state actors coproduce and co-depend, the 'non/state', recently the Chinese non/state in east Africa.

The second is the negotiation of the non/state in everyday life, through voluntary labour in Tanzania and now Kenya with her Wellcome Trust grant: 'Recruited, Mobilized, Conscripted'. The project combines historical perspectives on unpaid labour, and its promotion by various non/state agencies, with ethnographic fieldwork in Isiolo to understand how voluntary labour is effected today.