Serena Owusua Dankwa is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology. She has worked at the crossroads of academic, activist, and artistic forms of knowledge production, with a particular focus on queer, feminist, and African concepts of gender, friendship and intimacy. Her new research project focuses on safe house intimacies in relation to protection, security, mobility and repression and in the larger context of feminist development and solidarity projects.

Her monograph Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana (Cambridge 2021) is the first full-length ethnography on African women’s same-sex intimacies outside South Africa and received the Ruth Benedict Prize and the Elliot P.Skinner Prize of the American Anthropological Association.The book is based on doctoral research conducted in affiliation with the University of Ghana, Legon and was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Sarah Pettit Fellowship at Yale University.

Dankwa‘s focus on knowledge production is also informed, on the one hand, by action-research conducted at three schools of higher art education in Zurich and Geneva in the framework of Art.School.Differences. On the other hand, the higher education development project Critical Diversity Literacy through Arts and Further Education at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland allowed her to design research- and arts-based teaching formats that promote critical diversity. The findings of this project are documented in a three-part podcast and the co-edited open access volume Bildung.Macht.Diversität (transcript 2021). Further she co-edited the collection Racial Profiling (transcript 2019).

Dankwa returned to academia after an extended period of working in the field of gendered migration and development cooperation. In the NGO contect, she advocated for the rights of sex workers and labour migrants in Switzerland and trained community-based organizations in francophone West Africa and Southeast Europe working against gender-based violence and towards sexual and reproductive justice. She also serves as juror for the equality prize of the City of Zurich and on the expert commission of the Swiss cultural foundation pro helvetia.

Dankwa holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bern, an MMus from the Music Academy of Lucerne and an MA in African Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). For her MA she worked with ethnomusicological and historical data from the Basel Mission. Prior to her scholarly and non-governmental activities, she taught classical guitar and worked as cultural journalist for Swiss Radio and Television SRF and for BBC Radio 3 in London.

• Sexuality, Intimacy, Kinship

• Belonging, Intersectionality, Critical Diversity

• Development Cooperation and Reproductive Justice

• Gender-based Violence, Work Migration and Human Trafficking

• Black, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Feminisms

• West Africa

• Switzerland

• Southeast Europe