Dr Egle Cesnulyte

My broad interest is in the ways that gender functions to include or exclude individuals from opportunities related to their everyday lives. More particularly, I explore the ways that global economic and political structures are gendered and limits individuals’ agency.

For the past decade I have been working with sex workers in Kenya to explore the political economy of Kenya and the limits of women’s agency within it. My work with women selling sex in Mombasa and investigation of their work and livelihood strategies resulted in my first manuscript Selling Sex in Kenya: Gendered Agency under Neoliberalism (CUP, 2019). My later work has moved to explore sex worker activism and politics in eastern Africa.

Currently I am developing my research in two new directions. First, I am working with Kenyan community sex worker paralegals to explore everyday gendered access to justice for marginalised populations. Second, I work in the team developing research project on informality in food security strategies of Turks and Caicos Islands; especially the coloniality and gendered nature of the global infrastructure, and food supply chains in particular.