Phoebe Shambaugh
Post-doctoral Researcher Phoebe Shambaugh
I am an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on histories, narratives, and afterlives of conflict, displacement and aid. My research, which sits between history and anthropology, engages with experiences, memories and responses to conflict and displacement in East Africa and the UK. I am interested in questions related to memory, temporality, knowledge production and colonial legacies of aid systems. My research thus far has particularly focused on children, youth and education both as subjects of the humanitarian imaginary and as active participants and spaces of contestation. I completed my PhD in 2024 from the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, where my research focused on education as a politics of future-making in protracted displacement.
- Displacement
- Humanitarianism
- Education
- Temporality
Building on fieldwork, archives and networks in Uganda, my project explores histories and afterlives of USAID in this part of East Africa. The aftershocks of abrupt dissolution of USAID were omnipresent during fieldwork in Uganda in 2025. Aid ‘beneficiaries’ described failures to access medicine and services, practitioners described the closure of programmes and offices, and, as a researcher myself, I was consistently told of lost jobs and opportunities by researchers, brokers, surveyors, consultants, evaluators, and employees. The pervasiveness of narratives of loss from USAID illustrated clearly its function as a central pillar of Uganda’s neoliberal aid bargain since the late 1980s. This makes Uganda an ideal case study for an effort to reconstruct the role of USAID in the aid sector both in Uganda and globally. The research takes a multi-pronged approach – working with oral history and semi-structured interviews with former USAID employees, local consultants and partners, and ethnographic engagement in Uganda to explore the still-rippling after-effects of AID’s closure. This is complimented by new local NGO archives in Uganda to excavate the role of USAID in the evolution of humanitrian infrastructures and systems during the LRA war. I am particularly interested in USAID’s role in shaping aid ecosystems and knowledge economies in East Africa’s interconnected humanitarian crises.