Anthropology student’s Fulbright-Hays award focuses on cohabitation in Kenyan slums

Wilson

Ashley Wilson, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award to continue her research on long-term conjugal cohabitation relationships that are a common alternative to formal marriage among poor residents of the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya.

Known as “come we stay,” the living relationships are often assailed as illegitimate and immoral by kinship networks, clergy and feminist organizations, but Wilson’s preliminary research suggests that these relationships offer women many social, economic and intimate benefits.

To learn more, visit the Department of Anthropology website.