Dr Andrew Tucker is the Acting Director of the African Centre for Cities.
He has extensive experience working to understand and address inequality in a variety of forms across Africa. His work has explored how social markers such as race, sexuality and gender relate to the urban environment. This work has also examined how such relationships must be taken into account in health programmes, with a particular focus on HIV prevention, treatment and care.
Tucker completed his PhD at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge in 2006. This work examined the way sexual minorities from across South Africa’s historical racial categories were able to strategically and pragmatically appropriate urban spaces in diverse ways, to become visible to wider heteronormative societies. This led to the publication of his monograph Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town, as part of the RGS-IBG book series, by Wiley-Blackwell in 2009. Subsequently Tucker was appointed as the Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.
In 2014 Tucker relocated to South Africa and took up a position at the Anova Health Institute to conduct research into the particular healthcare needs of Key Populations, such as Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). This work included the development of the first community-based HIV prevention programme for MSM in South Africa. More recently Dr Tucker was appointed as the Project Manager for Anova Global Programmes, where he managed teams working to address the healthcare needs of Key Populations in countries such as Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, Botswana, Lesotho and Haiti.
Tucker has published widely in geographical and health journals. His current research interests include exploring the interface between health and human rights in Africa and considering the genealogy of urban identity-based political movements on the continent.
