My research explores the aftereffects of violence and its materialisation in death, disability and debility, and how subjectivities are formed and expressed under conditions of endemic violence in South Africa. More pragmatically, my research focuses on epistemology, disability, debility, race, gender, sexuality and other vectors of oppression and inequality. I am working towards developing an African Feminist approach to disability and debility.

I also experiment with writing to explore building intellectual, affective and ethical relations with readers that enable liberatory political horizons to be realized. My research is expressed in expository conceptual work which theorises explicitly, conceptually driven academic texts that use vulnerable writing to explore my intimate negotiation of episteme and consider settler colonial conceptual terrain and through fiction, which I use to enliven, and understand the theoretical quandaries I am troubled by.  My novel, Called to Song, published in 2018, was longlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (2019), shortlisted for the National Institute of Humanities and Social Science Prizes Fiction Book Awards (2020) and received the UCT Meritorious Book Award (2020).

My teaching reflects my epistemic orientation towards pluriversal liberatory anthropologies and the necessity to cultivate ethical imaginaries and subjectivities based on students’ ethico-political commitments. I am committed to developing the anthropology of disability and debility for the Global South and teach extensively on disability and debility. In 2020, I was awarded the Dean’s Teaching Award for my innovative curricula.

Current work and interests

• Book manuscripts

At present, I am working on a new novel which follows the aftermath of sexual violence, and its long affective life in reshaping survivors, their families and relations. The novel attempts to explore how debilitation, as an ordinary and everyday modality of being and sociality is woven through lives.

Based on my PhD research, Protesting death-disability-debility imaginaries: ontological erasure and the endemic violences of settler colonialism, I am working on a manuscript for publication.

With Polo Moji and Aika Swai, I am co-editing Conversational Bridges in African Feminisms based on the 2021 African Feminisms conference which we organized and hosted at UCT.

• Research projects

At present, I am leading the ethnographic research in an interdisciplinary project, led by Willem Stassen in Emergency Medicine and Judith McKenzie in Disability Studies: UCT Grand Challenges: The development of an approach to community-based, disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction systems.

• Journal Articles

Mohamed, K. (forthcoming) Debilitating research: scholarship of the obvious and epistemic trauma.

Select Publications

Books

Mohamed, K. (2018) Called to Song: a novel. Kwela: South Africa.

Edited journals and books

Lykke, N., Koobak, R., Bakos-Jarrett, P., Arora, S. & Mohamed, K. (Eds) (2023) Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place. Routledge.

https://www.routledge.com/Pluriversal-Conversations-on-Transnational-Feminisms-And-Words-Collide/Lykke-Koobak-Bakos-Arora-Mohamed/p/book/9781032457994

Co-edited with Tamara Shefer (2015) Special Issue: Gender and Disability, Agenda Feminist Journal, 29(2).

Journal articles (selection)

Rink, B., Mohamed, K., Ngoasheng, A. & Behari-Leak, K. (2020). Crossing Borders as New Academics in Contested Times. Cristal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 8;1-20.

Mohamed, K. (2019) An African Feminist Decolonial Disability Studies, Codesria Bulletin, Vol 1&2: 19-21.

Mohamed, K. & Shefer, T. (2015) Gendering Disability and Disabling Gender: a critical reflection on intersections of gender and disability. Agenda, 29(2): 1-12.

Mohamed, K. (2012) Who is the Southern African anthropologist? Anthropology Southern Africa, 35(3&4): 111-112.

Book chapters

Mohamed, K. (2023) Pedagogies of Precarity. Colliding Words and Worlds: Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms. In Lykke, N., Koobak, R., Bakos-Jarrett, P., Arora, S. & Mohamed, K. (Eds) Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place. Routledge.

Mohamed, K. (2022). Resilience, the Massification of Grief and the Covid-19 pandemic. In T. Enomoto, M. Swai & K. Umeya (eds) Bouncing Back: Critical Reflections on the Resilience Concept in Japan and South Africa (pp. 199-219). Cameroon: Langaa RPCID.

Mohamed, K. (2022). Pedagogies of betrayal: a meditation on internalised racism. In Nadia Sanger & Benita Moolman (eds)  Racism, Betrayals and New Imaginaries: Feminist Voices (pp. 36-53). UKZN Press: South Africa.

Other

     Mohamed, K. Debilitating Capitalism and the tragedy of essential work, Coronatimes, 27 April 2020  https://www.coronatimes.net/debilitating-capitalism-and-the-tragedy-of-essential-work/

Mohamed, K. (2020) Remaking the Ordinary in Lockdown: Corona Chronicles, Print edition, Melinda Ferguson (ed.) MFbooks / NB Publishers)

Mohamed, K. Questions for White Liberals. Feminist Talk, GenderIT.Org. https://genderit.org/feminist-talk/questions-white-liberals 18 June 2020.

Mohamed, K. (2018) Disability Matters! South African Labour Bulletin, July/August: 30-32.