On Love - with Serena Owusua Dankwa

How might thinking about love, against and beyond dominant representations help us understand our attachments differently?

In this episode with Serena Owusua Dankwa, we discuss love, affective attachments and emotional entanglements as studied by anthropologists. Dankwa is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, and her research and writing focus on questions related to gender sexuality intimacy in West Africa and Europe. Her work has spun from a long-term ethnographic work with women who love other women in southern Ghana to questions of subjectivity and experience in contexts of feminist humanitarianism, especially as they focus on gender-based violence or sex trafficking in Switzerland, Mali, and Bosnia. The conversation focuses on her book, Knowing Women. Same-sex Intimacy Gender and Identity in Post-colonial Ghana (2021), a book that has received the prestigious Ruth Benedict award and the Elliott Skinner award from the American Anthropological Association. 

Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) incollaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel