Gendered genealogies in the face of the Sudanese state

In this seminar, Dr. Azza Yacoub will critically analyse gendered genealogies in the face of modalities of power deployed by the Sudanese State.

Dr. Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on cultural understandings of health and well-being and how the socio-political impinges on constructions of identity and how these elements give life to diverse socio-cultural manifestations in multiple domains of social life.

Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz’s research has explored cultural understandings of health and well-being and how different individuals and groups engage with them. She has in-depth experience working on these issues among individuals and groups whose lives have been subject to experiences of forced migration and movement both in Sudan and in the United Kingdom. Her work has equally focused on the problematic of the diversity of Sudanese identities, from the vantage point of the social, the political and artistic practice, to elucidate how it impacts processes of exclusion, marginalisation, difference, belonging and becoming. 

Her interests highlight the fracturing of the Sudanese nation with the separation/ independence of South Sudan: its implications for state power and how it impinges on diverse social identifications in flux. More recently she has been working on revolution as a pathway in the construction of healthier modes of Sudanese national identities, as well as how these quests have been challenged during the period of transitional governance (2019 – 2021) as well as by the war which broke out in Sudan in April 2023.