Gender and kinship

Recognising that understandings of men and women, and the relations between them, vary in societies around the world, DASA researchers’ emphasis on sustained ‘on the ground’ research has generated new insights into longstanding debates about equality, difference, violence and justice.

Researchers

Academic staff:

• Lynne Brydon: Gender, changing family structures, migration, development issues, historicised ethnography
• 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.
• Kate Skinner: social and political histories of modern and contemporary Ghana and Togo, political activism, gender activism, legal reform, print cultures, mass literacy and education in other African countries.
• John Spall: gender and masculinities, war, military service, military refusal, religion and politics, and moral economy.

Doctoral researchers:

• Amy Redgrave: Colonial Anxieties, Local Debates and Struggles over 'Prostitution' in Southern Nigeria, 1890-1960.
• Stacey Kennedy: Women’s agency in the African contemporary art world; exploring cosmopolitan art networks 

Selected recent publications

• 2020. John Spall, Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society. MPLA Veterans & Post-war Dynamics, Boydell and Brewer.
• 2020. Insa Nolte, At least I am married, Social Anthropology
• 2018. Jessica Johnson, In Search of Gender Justice: Rights and Relationships in Matrilineal Malawi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• 2018. Jessica Johnson, Feminine futures: female initiation and aspiration in matrilineal Malawi Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 24 (4): 786-803.
• 2018. Kate Skinner, ‘Women, gender and “specifically historical” research on Ghana: a retrospective.’ Ghana Studies 21, pp. 95-120.
• 2015. Juliet Gilbert, The Heart as a Compass: Preaching self-worth and success to single young women in a Nigerian Pentecostal church, Journal of Religion in Africa 45(3-4) pp. 307-333
• 2015. Juliet Gilbert, Be graceful, patient, ever prayerful: negotiating femininity, respect and the religiuos self in a Nigerian beauty pageant. Africa, 85, 3

Projects

• An Archive of Activism: gender and public history in postcolonial Ghana
• Gender justice

Events

• The 2017 Cadbury conference on Marriage in Africa.

• Dr Helene Neveu-Kringelbach, ‘Love and Absence in Senegalese Families.’ The 2016 Annual Fage Lecture.

Find out more

• Research in African Studies and Anthropology
• Doctoral researchers
• Africa Talks seminars

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