About Stacey
Writer. Researcher. Teacher. Anthropologist.
What does it mean to heal?
For more than two decades, I have explored this question in East Africa. My research, writing, and teaching are rooted in the conviction that struggles over health are simultaneously struggles over land relations, knowledge systems, and the possibilities of collective life. I am concerned with the politics of knowledge, questions of evidence, and possibilities of care. I have explored these concerns through interlocking issues: the power of African healing, the science of traditional medicine, the afterlives of botanical colonization, the problem of toxicity, the politics of intellectual property, questions of bodily and territorial sovereignty, the work of chronicity and the rise of chronic disease, and the possibilities of gardens as therapeutic interventions.
In my most recent book, Medicine that Feed Us, I share lessons from innovative Tanzanian healers, NGO leaders, community organizers, and entrepreneurs who take healing to be a quality of life and health a form of lushness. Their work refuses to separate bodies from lands, medicine from agriculture, or care from justice. Their theorizing shapes my current work both in Tanzania and as collaborations draw me elsewhere.
Recently, I have been experimenting with ways in which anthropology might fuel experiments in healing (as) land relations. In 2019, I co-founded the Uzima Collective, which brought together diverse scholars, medical professionals, and community leaders from both Tanzania and the United States to reimagine healing in the face of intertwined environmental and health challenges. At the heart of this work was a two-acre anticolonial teaching, research, and healing garden at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center—a space for medical training, patient care, and collective repletion, inspiration, and healing. In 2025, I was awarded an Engaged Wenner Gren grant to collaborate with Helen Nguya and the Tanzanian non-governmental organization TRMEGA (Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation on Gender and AIDS). We are exploring what it takes to “eat well” amid rising rates of chronic disease, climate change, expanding social inequality, and the intensification of property regimes that support the enclosure of land and plant life. Our collective work seeks to reconceptualize eating well as a remedy to the persistent depletion and chronic injury of social and ecological abandonment. Our project expands gardens into periurban areas through seed and seedling exchange as well as workshops on nutrition, health, gardening and composting. Our research design and methods strives not only to describe innovative interventions into physical, social and ecological health, but also to contribute to the cultivation of strong, nourishing social and ecological communities.
I’m always interested to learn about plants and humans who are troubling the body-land relations which inhere in histories of dispossession and inequality by enacting alternative modes of existence and forms of liveliness. I welcome collaborations with scholars, artists, health professionals, growers, and activists imagining and enacting more just, more lush possibilities for collective survival.
