How can embodiment be a key site from which to tackle the world in which we live?

This episode, On Bodies, features Sabine Mohamed, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, who discusses the ways in which historical and social transformations are shaped by corporeal experiences.

Sabine's research examines the relationships among bodies, race, infrastructures, and futures in East Africa and other regions. Her scholarship broadly addresses urbanism, infrastructure, borders, migration, ports, and trade, with a key focus on how bodies and race mediate conceptions of the future. Working primarily in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Germany, Mohamed's current book project ethnographically investigates the interconnections between blackness and experiences of urban and national dispossession.

Her ongoing research traces the experiences of female laborers as they navigate economic exchange, Chinese investment, and resource extraction within the East African corridor. This work interrogates the complex intersections of labor, race, and gender. In parallel, she is engaged in a long-term project that examines Black feminist movements, sexualities, and practices of belonging in contemporary Germany.

Her publications have appeared in a range of international and interdisciplinary journals, including Verge, Modern Africa,Tertium Comparationis, and New Writing, as well as in edited volumes, such as Disembodied Territories (2022) and Counter_Readings of the Body (2021)

Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in

collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.