Academic Tour | Alysa Ghose

Alysa Ghose is an anthropologist of race, gender, and sexuality and a lecturer in Religion and Decolonisation at the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh. Her research has spanned feminist approaches to questions of indigeneity and health, geopolitics, Caribbean socialism, and reproduction and most recently kinship, migration and anti-Blackness. For the last 16 years she has worked as an ethnographer of Cuba with her most in-depth research being about Afrodiasporic/ indigenous religious traditions on the island, and relationships between the living and the dead as a means of survival in everyday precarity. With expertise on gender, migration, health, kinship and childhood in dialogue with indigenous spiritual practices, Alysa will discuss 3 main themes: the state and its satellites; knowledge and sensorial engagement and healing and repair. These themes emerge from Guadalupe Maravilla’s ‘Sana Sana, Colita de Rana’ (2024) and ‘Retablos’ (2023), two pieces from Maravilla’s Piedras de Fuego. While Maravilla’s work is the starting point tours will also include engagement with select pieces from Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts (2024).