Political Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, Migration & Diaspora Studies, Transnational Solidarity, Postcolonial Theory, Western Sahara, Spain.
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist who works in Northwest Africa and Southern Europe. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Sahrawi refugee camps located in Southern Algeria, my work examines the social reproduction of the political movement for the decolonisation of Western Sahara. Under the leadership of the Polisario Front, this Sahrawi movement for national liberation has retained longstanding nomadic values and practices that provide it with a capillary quality. My work examines the political value inherent to gendered forms of labor that sustain and regenerate the Polisario Front’s anti-colonial movement in the diaspora, through practices of mobility, both within and across nation-states.
Currently, my research explores the reproduction of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through the lens of intimate Spanish-Sahrawi relations that are enabling a growing Sahrawi migration to Spain. This research examines how a solidarity movement that emerged out of the colonial history between Spain and the Western Sahara produces a trans-political space that is implicated in the reproduction of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism across a transnational field. I supervise students seeking to study questions of forced displacement, decolonization, transnational feminism and solidarity, or who are exploring the relationship between social movements and the production of popular sovereignties and anti-imperialist solidarities more broadly.
2024. An Imperial Meantime: The Invisible Violence of a Humanitarian Peace in Western Sahara, American Ethnologist, Vol. 51, Issue 4, pp 502-515. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13346.
2022. Household Militancy: Beyond the Hypervisible Gendered Publics of a Sahrawi Revolutionary Nationalism. L’Ouest Saharien, 16, 53-71. https://doi.org/10.3917/ousa.221.0053
2021. Halted narratives: The combative futurity of Sahrawi female militant’s public memory, History and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2021.1983560
2021. "An Invisible War in Western Sahara," Middle East Report 298, Spring.
2020. “Between Publics and Privates: The Regeneration of Sahrawi Female Militancy.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 40, No. 1:150-165.
2020. Poetas y Poesía del Sahara Occidental: Antología de la Poesía Nacional Saharaui, Ultima línea (co-edited with Juan Carlos Gimeno Martin, Mohamed Ali Leman, Juan Ignacio Robles Picon, Bahia Mahmud Awah and Mohamed Salem Abdelfatah).
2019 “Hospitality's Prowess: Performing Sahrāwī Sovereignty in Refugee Camps”, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 42, Number 2, pp. 362-379. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12312.
2018 "Renégociation des relations de genre dans l’économie de la République arabe sahraouie démocratique” in Sahara Occidental: conflit oublié, population en mouvement, Eds. Sébastien Boulay and Francesco Correale, Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. Tours: 317-335.
2017 "Cementing Nationalism: The Role of the Sahrāwī Female Revolutionary in her Struggle for Decolonization." Culture et politique dans l'Ouest saharien: Arts, Activisme et Etat dans un espace de conflits. Ed. Francisco Freire and Sébastian Boulay. Igé: Éditions l’Étrave : 423-444.
2016 "No Somos Costosas, Somos Valiosas”: La Lucha de las Mujeres Saharauis Cuarenta Años Después." Sahara Occidental Cuarenta Años Después. Eds. Isaías Barrañada and Raquel Ojeda. Madrid: Catarata: 81-91.
2015, "The Strategy of Style: Music, Independence and the Aesthetics of Sahrawi Nationalism in Exile." Journal of Transmodernity 5.3: 40-61 (co-authored with Violeta Ruano Posada).
2011, "A Woman is Stronger than our State’: Performing Sovereignty on the Margins of the State." vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology 11. 1: 57-77.
