My research examines the way media technologies shape secular and Muslim modernities in northern Nigeria. First, I am especially interested in the material culture of technologies and these shape and are shaped by local religious and social beliefs. Second, I examine the imaginative worlds made available to Hausa youth by the circulation of transnational media flows, from Indian films to Islamic media, and the connections they create within and between non-Western countries. Third, my work analyzes the way media technologies have become central to the rise of new Islamic movements in the north of Nigeria.

Representative Publications:

2002 Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2002 Bandiri Music, Globalization and Urban Experience in Nigeria. In,Cahiers D’Études africaines 168 XLII-4 pp.739-762.

2002. Materializing Culture: Cinema and the Creation of Social Space. In, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 319-336.

2002. Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities. In, The Anthropology of Globalization. A Reader. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo eds. Oxford: Blackwell Books.

2003. Itineraries of Indian Cinema. African videos, Bollywood and Global media. In, Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism and Transnational Media. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam eds. pp. 170-192. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

2004. Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy. Public Culture. 16(4).