Department of African and African American Studies and Anthropology
aminatandow@g.harvard.edu
Aminata Ndow is a PhD student in African Studies and Anthropology. She holds a BA in History from the University of Antwerp and a MA in History from Ghent University. Her research broadly explores affective and political responses to enforced disappearances in The Gambia during the dictatorship (1994-present). For her capstone project she will use participatory visual methods to capture how adult children whose parents disappeared during the dictatorship, and are either still looking for their disappeared parent; or received confirmation of their parent’s death — without knowing where their parent’s remains were buried; or have reburied them after being exhumed and identified, experience mourning. This project will be conducted with and by adult children of the ‘disappeared’ to consider the context and social relationships in which their loss and mourning is situated. It seeks to analyze how spaces, contexts, generations, recollections, research and artistic productions are connected; to portray disappearance’s actual manifestation and main effects; and especially to reconfigure the meaning of presence and absence.