Books by Saida Hodzic
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of NGOs engaging in new campaigns to end th... more The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of NGOs engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum. What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a moment? The Twilight of Cutting examines these and other questions from the vantage point of Ghanaian feminist and reproductive health NGOs that have organized campaigns against cutting for over thirty years. The book looks at these NGOs not as solutions but as sites of " problematization. " The purpose of understanding Ghanaian campaigns, their transnational and regional encounters, and the forms of governmentality they produce is not to charge them with providing answers to the question, how do we end cutting? Instead, it is to account for their work, their historicity, the life worlds and subjectivities they engender, and the modes of reflection, imminent critique, and opposition they set in motion.
The Twilight of Cutting, 2017
Papers by Saida Hodzic
What does it mean to say "I am a refugee?" I know I am no longer one. Yet, I have been stopped in... more What does it mean to say "I am a refugee?" I know I am no longer one. Yet, I have been stopped in my tracks by the mediated witnessing of the fate of millions of people struggling to cross inhospitable European borders. I have been moved to shift the course of my research as well as to write autoethnographic pieces that connect the past and the present, illuminating refugee experiences and governance of refuge.
This is an introduction to three autoethnographic essays on experiences of refuge. We raise quest... more This is an introduction to three autoethnographic essays on experiences of refuge. We raise questions about the limits of liberal care and point to racialized and xenophobic cartographies of citizenship that have excluded refugees long before the current US administration.
American Ethnologist
This article encapsulates some of the core contributions of my first book, showing how cutting en... more This article encapsulates some of the core contributions of my first book, showing how cutting ended, and elaborating a theoretical critique of biopolitical crisis discourses. Intervening in debates about necropolitics and the ordinary crisis, I develop the concept of "slow harm" and argue that the invisible violence of neoliberal democracy produces protracted crises that make bodies vulnerable but not defined by death.
Female genital cutting is waning in northeastern Ghana, even though NGO and state discourses suggest otherwise. Women who no longer perform the practice do not resist anticutting advocacy, but critique what NGO and state interventions leave unaddressed. These women understand the ending of cutting as an index of food scarcity and governance that saps their blood and vitality. Cutting had to stop, they say, because they could no longer afford to lose more blood. Drawing on indigenous and biomedical understandings of health and popular notions of occult economies, they critique the contemporary governance that simultaneously invests in their lives and causes bodily attrition. [female genital cutting, food scarcity, vulnerability, governance by extraction, neoliberalism, Ghana]
Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, 2014
This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly debates about politics... more This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly debates about politics of knowledge in global governance and argues that bringing together insights from aesthetics of governance, science and technology studies, and theories of performativity offers a productive reorientation to existing approaches. My specific question is: how did WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about female genital cutting end up legitimizing them? For anthropologists who participated in the scientific controversy, the answer was clear: the study was driven by ideology. To expand the range of analytical responses, I suggest, we need to understand the rearrangements of knowledge and power in neoliberal governance, as well as a conception of authorship that uncouples scientific statements from sovereign subjects. Deadly harms were not made certain by ideology, I argue, but by aesthetics of expertise, WHO bundling of governance by emergency and governance by evidence, and performative iterations at the cultural boundaries of science. To make this argument, I analyze the historical conditions of possibility for the WHO study, offer an ethnography of knowledge production, and trace the social and governmental lives of fact and meaning-making.
This article provides a new lens for analyzing power formations in human rights practices by exam... more This article provides a new lens for analyzing power formations in human rights practices by examining Ghanaian struggles over a Domestic Violence Bill. While the hegemonic character of human rights advocacy is well-established, we know less about exercises of power in discourses and practices that oppose rights. I analyze how the Ghanaian government constructed the discourse of cultural sovereignty and deployed it against women’s rights. The government legitimated this discourse by appropriating the voice of ‘the people’ and superimposing notions of ‘foreignness’ onto both the Bill and Ghanaian women’s rights activists. Drawing on the historiography of colonialism and ethnography of political performance, I argue that this case illustrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty is mobilized in a struggle over shifting configurations of gender, political activism, and state sovereignty.
For Prospective Students by Saida Hodzic
On how to craft a personal statement, even though you should think twice about pursuing a PhD. Or... more On how to craft a personal statement, even though you should think twice about pursuing a PhD. Or: Good advice jars the ear.
Teaching Documents: Syllabi by Saida Hodzic
Office Hours: Wednesday after class (1.15-2.15pm) for FGSS 4000 students only (moved to before cl... more Office Hours: Wednesday after class (1.15-2.15pm) for FGSS 4000 students only (moved to before class on 1/29 and some additional dates TBA); 188 Rockefeller Hall; Wednesday 2.45pm-4pm, 204 McGraw Hall, first come, first serve (canceled on March 25)
Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy ha... more Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological ethnographies of humanitarianism. We will focus on texts that show how sentiments have become an essential force in national and global politics: public sentiments are mobilized across the political spectrum: to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, inspire feminist activism, and galvanize oppositional activist movements and counterpublics. Our main interest will be in exploring the practical workings and political contours of moral, liberal sentiments such as compassion, care, and concern, analyzing how they take hold in humanitarian projects. We will ask: What kinds of worlds do humanitarian ethical projects and political regimes make and unmake? What is the force of humanitarian sentiments? What relations of power are they imbricated in? How are they gendered, sexualized, and racialized? How are militarization, violence, humanitarianism, and progressive political projects co-constituted? Throughout the course, we will use sentiment and affect as lenses for analyzing the intersections between humanitarianism and post-colonial and neoliberal regimes of governance, as theorized and critiqued by feminist scholars, and as explored in ethnographic and historical texts. We shall explore how humanitarian affects mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and belonging. Goals and Objectives This course is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and will help you develop an informed, critical perspective on public lives of feelings and humanitarian governance through affect. We will work at the interstices of the humanities and the social sciences. The interdisciplinary character of the course means that you must be open to gaining insights from engaging with and struggling with both theoretical and empirical texts. In turn, the course will enhance your ability to articulate relationships between theoretical concepts and ethnographic particularities of historically situated worlds and postcolonial situations. Course assignments will help you develop your analytical, research, and critical reading skills. Argument analysis papers and critical responses will set the ground for thoughtful discussion, and will help you practice close, rigorous, and productive reading of texts that can be generative for your own work. Your work for the final project will enhance your research, presentation, and communication skills.
Course Meetings: Th 12.20-2.15 in A.D. White House 210 Office Hours: TH 2.30-4.30pm and by appoin... more Course Meetings: Th 12.20-2.15 in A.D. White House 210 Office Hours: TH 2.30-4.30pm and by appointment, A.D. White House 309 (on nice days, in the garden behind the building). Sign-up sheets will be posted on my office door.
This course addresses emerging interest in public and politically engaged anthropology as well as... more This course addresses emerging interest in public and politically engaged anthropology as well as in anthropological theorizing that explicitly addresses the questions of anthropological relevance and self-constitution in the contemporary moment. It asks how anthropologists articulate the relevance of our work in theoretical and political terms by staging an encounter between three disparate strands of scholarship: anthropology of the contemporary, engaged/public anthropology, and anthropology of everyday violence and ordinary affects. Our aim is threefold: to a) historically and theoretically contextualize these strands of scholarship, b) extend them in new directions and c) offer you platforms for rethinking your own research in light of engagement with course topics. Designed to bring together pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork graduate students, this seminar functions as a laboratory for expanding existing conversations and exploring further articulations of engaged anthropology of the contemporary. Participants will reflect on how their political commitments, ethnographic and other sensibilities, and theoretical perspectives inform each other, and will invigorate their research design, writing, and analytical frameworks in light of these reflections and engagement with course texts. The course is open to students from across the disciplines.
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Books by Saida Hodzic
Papers by Saida Hodzic
Female genital cutting is waning in northeastern Ghana, even though NGO and state discourses suggest otherwise. Women who no longer perform the practice do not resist anticutting advocacy, but critique what NGO and state interventions leave unaddressed. These women understand the ending of cutting as an index of food scarcity and governance that saps their blood and vitality. Cutting had to stop, they say, because they could no longer afford to lose more blood. Drawing on indigenous and biomedical understandings of health and popular notions of occult economies, they critique the contemporary governance that simultaneously invests in their lives and causes bodily attrition. [female genital cutting, food scarcity, vulnerability, governance by extraction, neoliberalism, Ghana]
For Prospective Students by Saida Hodzic
Teaching Documents: Syllabi by Saida Hodzic
Female genital cutting is waning in northeastern Ghana, even though NGO and state discourses suggest otherwise. Women who no longer perform the practice do not resist anticutting advocacy, but critique what NGO and state interventions leave unaddressed. These women understand the ending of cutting as an index of food scarcity and governance that saps their blood and vitality. Cutting had to stop, they say, because they could no longer afford to lose more blood. Drawing on indigenous and biomedical understandings of health and popular notions of occult economies, they critique the contemporary governance that simultaneously invests in their lives and causes bodily attrition. [female genital cutting, food scarcity, vulnerability, governance by extraction, neoliberalism, Ghana]