Claire earned her PhD from the LSE’s Gender Department in May 2024, where she is now a cross-appointed visiting fellow with the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Her PhD project – an ethnography of police stations in Nigeria – traced the afterlives of structural power in the wake of expanded legal protections against sexual and gender-based violence. It explored how efforts to attain safety and justice interact with structural configurations of power (gender, race, class, and others) through testimony, doubt, and belief in post-colonial legal systems. During her PhD, Claire worked as a freelance writer and journalist, as well as a Research Officer with the UKRI-funded Gender Justice and Security Hub, based at LSE. At the Hub, she managed projects relating to rights ‘backlashes’, transitional justice, and migration. Her ethnographic research and journalism has taken place in Canada, the UK, the US, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Kenya, Turkey, and South Africa.
Claire’s research interests range from critical epistemology, affect, and de-colonial theory, to technology, legal institutional ethnography, and other applied studies of power. She currently works as an investigative journalist and a freelance researcher. She holds a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a master’s degree from the University of Toronto.