Introduction: Post-Doctoral Researcher Phoebe Shambaugh

Phoebe Shambaugh is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth, as a member of the Network Humanitarian Research (NHF), funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

As part of the project The Production of Indifference. A History of Anti-Humanitarian Knowledge Destruction, she is working on the dissolution of USAID and examines histories and afterlives of USAID in East Africa, with a focus on Uganda.

Her research takes a multi-pronged approach – working with oral history and semi-structured interviews with former USAID employees, local consultants and partners, as well as ethnographic engagement in Uganda and is complimented by  local NGO archives in the country. The aim is to reconstruct the role of USAID in shaping aid ecosystems and knowledge economies in East Africa’s interconnected humanitarian crises.

Phoebe Shambaugh completed her PhD in 2024 from the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, where she focused on education as a politics of future-making in protracted displacement.