Biruk doesn’t seem to explicitly talk much about race, sexuality, or gender in her analyses and usually uses “as an anthropologist amongst the demographers.” This could possibly be because Black and white do not mean the same thing in the Malawian context (of course) and she is worried having to translate those contexts and concepts to her reader? It is possible that is not part of the discursive landscape there so no need to mention it… BUT in discussions about the benefits that “foreign researchers” have - which she spends a whole chapter on (something also discussed heavily in Kenya), subjectivities like being white and black or read as white and black definitely come up. As such, including global race politics (I guess that would be at the NANO level?) seems to be a discursive risk I can identify in Biruk’s work.
