C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Social and cultural anthropology, Black diaspora experience, Race and Representation, Sound studies, Visual anthropology, Media anthropology, Affect, Phenomenology, Emotion, Space, Spatiality, Black Studies
Research Area(s)
Europe, Germany, Berlin (Afro-Caribbean Diaspora)
Departmental Activities
Profile
Melody Howse joined the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ in January 2024. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural anthropology from Leipzig University, which she completed in 2023. She received her MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin and completed a BA in visual communications from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design.
Melody’s postdoctoral research focuses on racialized experience in Europe, and specifically on Black experience in Germany. Building directly on her PhD research, this project takes multiple positions – entering the experience via the body, space, images, and sound – in an endeavour to understand how race becomes articulated within the social spaces of cities and within the imaginaries of their inhabitants. In doing so, the research investigates the effects of racializing and racism on the body, especially how narratives of race become embodied. This community-based project uses visual, sonic, and collaborative research methods to produce a critical phenomenology of Black experience in Berlin. Highlighting the counter practices and counter narratives which are developed and honed within the Black diaspora, Melody’s work engages extensively with Black diaspora practices of ‘Refusal’ to widen the vocabulary of how Black experience is both understood and theorized.
Melody was awarded a Leverhulme Trust studentship to complete her PhD. Prior to re-entering the academy to pursue her MA, Melody worked as a filmmaker for commercial television and documentaries in the UK. Her work still engages extensively with images, archives and sound, and filmmaking remains an essential part of her research practice.