Mwaura Mburu

Geographies of Liveability: Engendering Queer Space in Kenya's Urban and Peri-Urban MSM Sexual Health Clinics

Mwaura Mburu is a doctoral researcher, and community organiser from Nairobi, Kenya working at the intersection of geographies of sexualities, queer African studies, queer ethnography, and urban geography. His DPhil research asks how queer communities in urban and peri-urban Kenya use and re-signify the medical spaces of sexual health clinics for political organisation beyond the management of health. Crucially, his work asks how the community work that those who gather at these clinics undertake shapes the terms of liveability for queer subjects in Kenya. Mwaura's work sits within a growing scholarship in the urban geographies of queer life in the Global South that asks how communities engage with, subvert, and unsettle development narratives that position them within discourses of illness, decline, and contagion.

Prior to Oxford, Mwaura was a Chevening Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed an MSc in Africa and International Development. He holds a BSc in Economics from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Nairobi, Kenya. Before his academic career, he gained international experience in youth development and talent management - serving in leadership roles at AIESEC, including as Chapter President and Vice-President of Outgoing Global Exchange, and subsequently managing the ACE Programme at Tata Consultancy Services across Mumbai, Indore, Ahmedabad and Nagpur Offices – overseeing the annual recruitment, onboarding and professional development of over 100 international young professionals. Alongside his doctoral studies, he works as a community organiser with the TQF-Kenya, a mutual aid collective that mobilises monetary and non-monetary support to support gender and sexual minorities facing crisis in Kenya. His DPhil at Oxford is supported by the Thalmann Fund and the Christ Church Clarendon Partnership Award in Social Sciences.

Awards

• British Institute in East Africa Thematic Research Grant, 2026
• Clarendon Scholarship, 2025
• Chevening Scholarship, 2022
   

Book Chapter

• Mburu, M., Mwaura, M. and Haggai, T. (In Press: Expected Early 2027) A Nairobi Queer Space Quest for Strategic Invisibility and Liveability. In: C.W. Kihato and L.B. Landau (eds.) Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming African Cityscapes. Johannesburg: Wits University Press & ACTAR Publishers

Book Review 

• Mburu, M. (2025) Review of Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Asylum, and Diaspora, by B. Camminga and John Marnell. Journal of Refugee Studies, feaf061.