Biography

Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the body and sociality. Her last project dealt with apartheid victimhood in South Africa and the possibilities of emancipating from experiences of violence by way of the law and new forms of sociality. Her current project looks at social life in a new mining town in Zambia where she examines the relation between built environment and agency.

Selected publications:

2016      Law and the Injured Body: Apartheid Victimhood Before Courts. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

2015      Case Pending: Practices of inclusion and exclusion in a class of plaintiffs. Anthropology Southern Africa 38, 2015, H. 1-2; pp. 16-28.

2015      Experiences of Violence and the Formation of the Political: Embodied memory and victimhood in South Africa. In Förster, T. and L. Koechlin (eds.) The Politics of Governance. New York: Routledge; pp. 151-179.

2015      Moments of Dislocation: Why the Body Matters in Ethnographic Research. Basel: Basel Papers on Political Transformations, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel.