Dr Gabrielle Robbins
Gabrielle’s historical ethnographic research explores health and livelihood in Madagascar and the broader East African/western Indian Ocean region amid overlapping socio-environmental changes. She is particularly invested in using long-term ethnographic and transdisciplinary methods to illuminate relationships between everyday life and macro-scalar processes across sectors of Malagasy society.
Her current work examines the shifting politics of medical substances, systems, and logics as they intersect with gendered and racialized dynamics over the 20th and 21st centuries, which she is developing into several publications including her first monograph.
She is also pursuing two new projects. The first is a joint effort with Malagasy and international colleagues on the dense politics of human remains in central Madagascar. In response to increased bone thefts from family tombs, the project explores the ways that ancestral remains mediate major concerns about personhood, the body, and the family given mounting insecurity. Results will be communicated in an edited volume and planned ethnographic film. The second effort examines profound changes in Malagasy society catalysed by intensifying cyclones. Through work with environmental justice youth organizations, poets and artists, and health and disaster agencies on the island alongside local communities, this project asks how worsening cyclones and cyclone impacts are known, withstood, mitigated, and represented.
Gabrielle was awarded a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) from MIT in 2023. She also holds a MS from MIT HASTS and an honors BA in anthropology from Barnard College. Before joining the African Studies Centre, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She currently teaches on the African Studies MSc, serving as course convener for the core course on research methods and ethics and supervising MSc students. Potential postgraduate students in African studies and anthropology should feel free to reach out.
Beyond Gabrielle's research work, other topics of interest include the history of anthropology in Africa and the Indian Ocean; genres of ethnographic representation; regional linguistics, art, and creative expression; religious life and ritual; internal and transoceanic migration; and extensive processes of multi-cultural connection along the Indian Ocean rim and beyond.
