Doctoral candidate in project 11 - Charlotte Sophie Bruns Knight

My name is Charlotte Sophie Bruns Knight, a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies at the University of Nairobi, supervised by Professor W. Onyango-Ouma at UoN and Professor Steven van Wolputte at KU Leuven.
This research project extends into small East African Indian Ocean coastal towns that remain underrepresented in global health and urban commons scholarship, despite being at the forefront of climate- and infrastructure-driven transformation. It does so by examining how residents of coastal Kenya perceive and navigate shared urban commons amid rapid urbanisation, large-scale infrastructure development, and intersecting socio-ecological pressures, and how these shifting dynamics shape uneven health outcomes across communities.
This work grows out of time spent in Lamu, an island town on Kenya's northern coast, where questions of urban commons acquire a tangible immediacy: how they are shared or lost; how environmental degradation becomes embodied harm; and whose knowledge counts in governing collective resources.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Lamu and the wider coastal region, I aim to trace everyday negotiations over shared resources, examine governance as it is enacted through infrastructures, social relations, and institutional arrangements, and explore the mechanisms through which this interplay produces uneven health burdens across gender, generation, religion, and socio-economic position.
Central to this research is the framing of these processes by residents through Islamic governance structures, customary tenure, and Swahili epistemologies, which shape how environmental responsibility, authority, and collective life are understood along the Swahili coast. My earlier work with the Ustadh Mau Digital Archive (UMADA), on the manuscripts of the Lamu scholar-poet Ustadh Mau, introduced me to these traditions as living intellectual practices that continue to inform interpretations of environmental change, rather than static cultural heritage