Aalyia is a PhD candidate from Kenya in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Her research focuses on how demographic and political transformations reconfigure everyday intimate practices and social relationships in contemporary Africa. Her dissertation project examines the politics of aging and care in Rwanda. It is an ethnographic analysis of how older persons - many of whom were in their prime of life and lost their spouses and children during the 1994 genocide - negotiate the physical and social experiences of aging in an environment where family obligations and notions of kin are taking on new forms of meaning. Her project wrestles with broader questions about morality, dependency, kinship, power, and conflict across gender and generation in Africa and the Global South at large. In addition to continuing to further develop her dissertation at MIT, Aalyia will participate in seminar series in the Departments of Anthropology and Global Studies and Languages, connect with fellow doctoral students and pre-doctoral scholars, and start to lay the foundation for her second project.