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Gender and kinship

Kinship and gender are complementary analytical lenses and inextricable social phenomena.

DASA research brings kinship and gender analysis together with temporal depth, building on our commitment to sustained ‘on the ground’ research on gender and kinship. We engage with gender as a mode of historical and anthropological analysis: How we think about gender reflects changing social and cultural practices and ideas, which in turn inform broader social practices and historical developments.

Meanwhile, DASA research on kinship explores (new) configurations and practices of relatedness through topics such as marriage and intergenerational reciprocity while drawing attention to the concept of generation as a means of understanding social dynamics and change. Recognising that understandings of men, women, and other gendered subject positions, as well as the relations between them, vary in societies around the world, DASA researchers explore gender and, with it, kinship, both as the result of individual assertion and in relation to other relationships and forms of attachment.

Our researchers also embrace new forms of collaborative knowledge production, such as working with non-academic partners in the University Collections and in the public health sector in Nigeria to better understand maternal care in southeast Nigeria.

Researchers

Academic staff

  • Leslie Fesenmyer: transnational migration, kinship, belonging, and religion (especially Pentecostalism)
  • Juliet Gilbert: youth studies, religion, insecure livelihoods, and aspects of popular culture (fashion, beauty pageants, mobile phones).
  • Jessica Johnson: social anthropology specialising in Southern Africa, anthropology of gender and law in Malawi.
  • Insa Nolte: Yoruba history, culture and politics, gender relations.

Doctoral research

  • Stacey Kennedy (viva-ed 2023) - Women's agency in the African Contemporary Art World; exploring Nigerian art networks
  • Francine Kola-Bankole (viva-ed 2025) - Activism and Gender within the Arts of Contemporary Nigeria
  • Sini Hassinen (viva-ed in 2024) - Queer Joy, Resistance and Community in Nairobi
  • Christine Makuve – Starting 2025

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD related to Gender and Kinship, please contact a member of staff above.

Current projects

Previous projects

 Publications

Monographs and other books

  • Gilbert, J forthcoming, Fashioning Futures: Uncertainty and young women's livelihoods in urban Nigeria. International African Library, Cambridge University Press.
  • Fesenmyer, L. 2023 Relative Distance: Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press).
  • Johnson. J. 2018. In Search of Gender Justice: Rights and Relationships in Matrilineal Malawi (Cambridge University Press).

Articles and book chapters

  • Nolte, I., 2025. Yoruba Histories of Marriage and Belonging: Gender, Power and Innovation in Eighteenth‐Century West Africa. Gender & History.
  • Asaaju, M., 2023. “The Native Court Way” Disputes over Marriage, Divorce, and “Adultery” in Colonial Courts in Abeokuta (Southwestern Nigeria), 1905–1945. Journal of West African History, 9(1), pp.27-56.
  • Asaaju, M., 2022. ‘They Gave Me Nothing’: Marriage, Slavery and Divorce in Twentieth-Century Abeokuta. Slavery & Abolition, 43(2), pp.346-365.
  • Nolte, I. 2020, “‘At least I am married’: Muslim-Christian marriage and gender in southwest Nigeria”, Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale 28(2), 343-450.
  • Johnson, J. 2018. ‘Feminist Anthropology and the Question of Gender’ in M. Candea (ed), Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Routledge.
  • Fesenmyer, L 2018 Pentecostal pastorhood as calling and career: Migration, masculinity, and religion between Kenya and the United Kingdom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 24(4): 749-766.
  • Fesenmyer, L 2016 ‘Assistance but not support’: Pentecostalism and the reconfiguring of relatedness between Kenya and the United Kingdom. In Affective Circuits: African Journeys and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration. Jennifer Coles and Christian Groes-Green, Eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Peer-reviewed]
  • Gilbert, J 2015, '‘Be Graceful, Patient, Ever Prayerful’: Negotiating Femininity, Respect and the Religious Self in a Nigerian Beauty Pageant', Africa, vol. 85, no. 03, pp. 501-520.

 

Events

 

Media