Raphaëlle Rabanes (she/her/hers)

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.