Walk in the world with your whole self.
Black feminist anthropologist. Culture worker. Storyteller.
I am the Vann Professor of Racial Justice, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Davidson College. I have 20+ years of teaching experience and leading workshops in the US, UK and Ghana.
I am a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes, and teaches about social (im)mobility and women’s work in Africa and the US. As a Black feminist ethnographer with over 20+ years of fieldwork experience, I focus on women’s labor and modernity, the affective qualities of antiblackness, and the sensory politics of belonging.
I also study the social lives of photographs and cultural workers, exploring how images shape understanding of the world and map blackness, class, gender and queerness. I also maintain a playful photographic practice on Black women’s leisure.
With support from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Leeway Grant Foundation, Boswell Family Fellowship, and Vann endowed professorship, I have published articles in African Arts, Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review as well as presented my work in North America, Africa, and Europe. My book, Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness and Modernity in Accra, was published by University Pennsylvania in 2025.
Cultural Worker, Not A “Creative”
Kweku Ananse
Cultural worker has a moral positioning embedded into it, as well as an inherent accountability. To call oneself a cultural worker, as opposed to a creative, is to essentially say that your labor, or at least a particular fraction of it, occurs with the intention to uphold a certain culture. It proposes that your labor as an artist, your work in art and literature, is accountable to the idea of culture.
A born and bred Philly jawn & Girls’ High girl, my love of stories is shaped by my non-academic work as a queer youth counselor in rural Pennsylvania, a West Philly bartender, film production assistant and an A&R intern for a record label in London.
I am currently an Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Davidson College and an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies departments. I am also the Director of the Davidson in Ghana study abroad program.
