Kwame Otu is a cultural anthropologist with varied interests, ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African diaspora. His first book, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022), is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, Otu draws on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana.

Otu’s ongoing ethnographic project investigates the vitality of the queerness of waste in general, and electronic waste, in particular, focusing on a community of e-waste workers whose lives, he argues, archive the multitudinous afterlives of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.

In addition to the above projects, Otu is working on a memoir that documents his upbringing as a queer Ghanaian man in a traditional Presbyterian family in urban Ghana. Called In My Mother’s House, the memoir, which is part epistolary and part autobiographical, documents the erosion of his once intimate relationship with his mother.

Otu served as an External Evaluator for the 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellowship.