I am a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where my dissertation examines profound intellectual disability at the intersection of urban informality and the ethics of care. Working primarily in Slovo Park, an informal settlement in Johannesburg, I ask how care operates as a form of infrastructure (improvised, relational, and load-bearing) in contexts where the state's formal systems are absent, partial, or actively exclusionary.

My research draws on long-term ethnographic engagement and participatory methods developed in collaboration with caregivers, community organizers, and disabled residents. Rather than treating disability as a discrete policy problem to be solved through formal planning instruments, I am interested in what the everyday practices of care in informal settlements can reveal about the limits of dominant planning paradigms; particularly their reliance on autonomy and self-sufficiency as normative goods. Slovo Park becomes, in this sense, an empirical site through which to rethink the theoretical opposition between autonomy and interdependence that structures much of planning and disability theory alike.

This work sits at the intersection of disability justice, feminist political economy, and critical urban studies, and is informed by ongoing debates in the anthropology of development around informality, care, and the limits of state provision. I understand research accountability as a methodological commitment, not an afterthought: I aim to produce scholarship that is answerable to the communities that make it possible, and that resists extracting knowledge without reciprocal obligation.