Peacebuilding

I work at the intersection of media systems, narrative authority, and conflict transformation — the question underneath all of it being who gets to tell the story of a crisis, and who decides what happens next.

Right now, that work is concrete: I'm a graduate student consultant on the Malawi Voice Data Commons (MVDC), a voice-based, toll-free crisis reporting platform that lets people report emergencies in their own languages from basic mobile phones. The project is a collaboration between NYU's Peace Research and Education Program (PREP) and UNDP Malawi, working with university hubs and thousands of community volunteers across multiple districts.

My focus is community data governance — designing how the communities whose voices power the platform actually own and govern that data. That means building governance structures that integrate traditional Malawian authority structures rather than importing a framework from elsewhere, and asking uncomfortable questions about extraction: who benefits when a community's crisis reports become a dataset, and who should.

The rest of the work happens in rooms, not documents — participatory design workshops with students and community members, multilingual prompt development, and filmmaking workshops that are also, quietly, peacebuilding: people telling their own stories with their own equipment.

The thinking behind the practice draws on Elinor Ostrom's commons governance, John Paul Lederach's conflict transformation, and decolonial research methodology — but mostly it draws on the people doing the work locally, who were building peace long before anyone called it that.

For the formal version of all this: my research resume.