Sabine Mohamed is a political, urban, and economic anthropologist. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg in 2021. Her dissertation and current book project, entitled Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia, ethnographically explores how categories of blackness and race, as well as experiences of urban and national dispossession are attached to an infrastructure of emergent empire in East Africa. This work is based on her fieldwork in Addis Ababa working with young informal laborers, female domestic workers, as well as refugees and deported returnees of Eritrean descent. She has also conducted archival research that traces the multi-directional transatlantic circulation of blackness, between the Caribbean, North America, and Ethiopia. Her next project will follow female laborers through the gendered and racialized routes of economic exchange, Chinese investment, and resource extraction in the East African corridor. In addition to her research in East Africa, she has an ongoing long-term project situating black feminist movements, sexualities, and practices of belonging in contemporary Germany.

Before joining Johns Hopkins University, Sabine was a “Bridge to the Faculty” postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and prior to that a doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She has been the co-convenor of the Network for Contemporary Anthropological Theory with the European Association for Social Anthropologists (2020-2022), and is also a founding member of bildungslab*, a collective of feminist scholars of color in the German-speaking world on reimagining education, the classroom, and pedagogy.

Journal Articles

2024 “Chokepoints and Queer Becoming." Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 1 (2024): 59-64.  https://doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2024.a922358.

2023 “Notes on bewilderment, suspension, and urban life at the extensions” Dialogues in Human Geography, 0(0). (online first, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231217567 )

2022 “Introduction: Eritrea’s Uneasy Futures and Their Historical Contingencies” Modern Africa: Politics, History, and Society, Special Issue: “Eritrea’s Uneasy Future” with Magnus Treiber and David O’Kane, 10:1, 5-32

2022 “Afterword: The Black Box of Eritrean Futurity” Modern Africa: Politics, History, and Society, Special Issue: “Eritrea’s Uneasy Future,” 10:1, 145-164.

2020 “#MustFall: Überlegungen zur Dekolonialisierung und einer postkolonialen Ästhetik an der Universität” Tertium Comparationis: Journal for International Comparative and Multicultural Education, 26:1, 22-37.

2019 “Ethiopian image: face, trace, interiority” New Writing, Special Issue: Convoluting the Dialectical Image, 16:4, 453-457.

Edited Volumes

2022 “Dead on Arrival: Beirut, Bodies, and Futurity in Addis Ababa” for the Disembodied Territories project https://disembodiedterritories.com/Dead-on-Arrival

2021d Bildung – Ein postkoloniales Manifest. As bildungs*Lab Collective. Münster: Unrast Verlag.

2021c “#Must Fall: Imagination, Sprache und Ästhetik.” In Bildung – Ein postkoloniales Manifest, edited by bildungsLab* Collective. Münster: Unrast Verlag.

2021b “Bodies in the outside: Artistic imaginations in Afrofuturism”. With MdM. Castro Varela. In Counter_Readings of the Body edited by Daniel Neugebauer, 57-64. Leipzig: Spector Books.

2021a “Intersektionalität und Postkoloniale Soziale Arbeit.” With MdM. Castro Varela. In Handbuch Intersektionalitätsforschung, edited by A. Mefebue, A. Bührmann and S. Grenz, Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-26613-4_39-1 (online first)

2015 “Djibouti: Das Tor der Tränen.” In Grenzen erzählen Geschichten. Was Landkarten offenbaren, edited by David Signer, 89-91. Zürich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung Verlag.

2014 “Schwarzes feministisches Denken und Handeln in Deutschland.” [Black Feminist Thought and Activism in Germany]. With M. Eggers [Auma]. In Feminismen heute, Positionen in Theorie und Praxis, edited by Yvonne Franke et al., 57-76. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Scientific Reports

2012 “... Nicht so greifbar und doch real“ – Eine quantitative und qualitative Studie zu Gewalt-und (Mehrfach-)Diskriminierungserfahrungen von lesbischen, bisexuellen Frauen und Trans* in Deutschland” [... not tangible and yet real – A quantitative and qualitative study on violence and of multiple discriminations experienced by lesbian, bisexual women and trans persons in Germany]. With M. Castro Varela et al. LesMigras Antigewalt- und Antidiskriminierungsbereich der Lesbenberatung: Berlin, pp 244.

(selected) Media Outreach

2019 Online dictionary entry “Schwarz” [Black/Blackness] for the Diversity Arts Culture Institute in Berlin.

2018 Annotated bibliography on “Afrofuturism & Space is the Place” for the European Association of Sociocultural Anthropology (EASA) Network of Ethnographic Theory blog.

2014b “Hinrichtung kamerunischer Widerstandskämpfer” In Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 08/28/2014.

2014a “Sturz des äthiopischen Kaisers” In Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09/15/2014.

2013 “In Eritrea bleiben heisst sterben” In Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11/31/2013.

2012 “Überlegungen zu geschlechterpolitischen Bündnissen, ihre Chancen, ihre Probleme und Totgeburten.” [Reflections about gender political alliances, its chances, its challenges and still births] Heinrich Böll Foundation. [Online].