Raphaëlle Rabanes (she/her/hers)

Assistant Professor
Sociocultural Anthropology
Dr. Rabanes, a woman with shoulder-length wavy black hair and medium-light skin is smiling and looking into the camera.

Contact Information

Denny Hall, M230
Office Hours
On leave for academic year 2023-2024

Biography

Ph.D., Medical Anthropology, University of California Berkeley & San Francisco, 2020
M. Phil., Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Paris Diderot, 2009
M. Clin., Clinical Psychology, University of Paris Diderot, 2005

I am a medical anthropologist who works across the fields of Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Disability Studies. Previously, I practiced as a clinical psychologist in several French hospitals, with degrees from the University of Paris Diderot. My current research and teaching bring together anthropological approaches to the study of health, race, embodiment, and the long shadow of history in the African Diaspora.

I have been conducting ethnographic research in Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) since 2012. My book manuscript—Postcolonial Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean—explores how Guadeloupeans address the long aftermath of slavery and colonialism as well as ongoing entanglements with France in their everyday lives. I bring together health care, performance, and activism to examine personal and collective movements of repair. My next project will turn to the work of Guadeloupean mental health professionals to see how they understand and address the presence of history, intergenerational transmission and structural inequities in their clinical work.

I invite students to envision an integrative approach to health that critically interrogates the limits of biomedical definitions and encompasses collective and psychic dimensions. My courses examine embodiment, care, ethnography, the production of raced bodies and populations in medicine and society, as well as practices of resistance against structural racism in everyday life and social justice movements.

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