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. Meanwhile, DASA research on kinship explores (new) configurations and practices of relatedness through topics as marriage and intergenerational reciprocity.

Researchers

Academic staff:

• Morenikeji Asaaju: gender, marriage, family, slavery, emancipation, and the slave trade
• Lynne Brydon: gender, changing family structures, migration, development issues, historicised ethnography
• 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.
• 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.

Doctoral research:

• Francine Kola-Bankole: Activism and Gender within the Arts of Contemporary Nigeria.
• Sini Hassinen: Queer Joy, Resistance and Community in Nairobi
• Amy Redgrave: Colonial Anxieties, Local Debates and Struggles over 'Prostitution' in Southern Nigeria, 1890-1960.

Selected recent publications

• Morenikeji Asaaju. 2022. Revisiting gender and marriage: runaway wives, native law and custom, and the native courts in colonial Abeokuta, Nigeria. Journal of Women’s History (accepted and in press).
• Juliet Gilbert. 2019. ‘They’re my contacts, not my friends’: reconfiguring affect and aspirations through mobile communication in Nigeria. Ethnos 82 (2): 237-254.
• 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.
• 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

• Relative distance: kinship, migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom
• 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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