Her work focused on Sufi mysticism, diasporas, Muslim women and public sector unions in Botswana.
Her ethnography, which won an Honorable Mention in 2015 in the Elliot P. Skinner Award from the Association of Africanist Anthropology, analysed the legal mobilisation and struggle for dignity and a living wage of manual public sector workers, both men and women, and traced the evolution of a rooted, working class identity and culture in Botswana, which is both local and cosmopolitan, through cultural performance.
Her work highlighted the vernacular, situated cosmopolitanism of rights activists, trade unionists and feminists in the global south, transnational labour migrants and Sufis.
She rejected, however, optimistic views of transnationalism as effacing national boundaries, and argued for the need to recognise the illusion of simultaneity, disguising the ruptures that transnational movement engenders.
[citation needed] She saw the materiality of diaspora as manifested both affectively and aesthetically, with its members willing to mobilize politically and economically across borders in response to the sufferings of fellow diasporans or crises in the 'home' country.