I am grateful to announce that I have received a Catharina Halkes Fonds fellowship grant to finalize fieldwork in Chad and Senegal and complete my first ethnographic film.
From January until March 2026 I will stay in Chad to present and discuss the first version of this audiovisual work, that I filmed in January 2025 with the creative and practical support of Jilles van Kleef and financial support of Leiden University Fund.
The ethnographic film is bound to tell a story about care, resilience and movement. It is about the organization of Muslim women in Chad. The viewer follows three women from the Maare clan of Fulani who are, on the one hand, paving the way for a self-aware Islamic standpoint and, on the other hand, paving the way in an environment where self-reliance and perseverance characterize everyday life. The stories of the teachers are linked by shared family ties and the networks they are part of. They each run a Quran school with the help of many sisters. I engage in dialogue with women to shed light on the central role of female Muslim scholars in Central Africa and to capture Sufi practices that are part of the contemporary Chadian landscape in their audiovisual complexity. In the ethnographic film, I seek a narrative form in which knowledge and sensory experience come together. The three main characters are (great-)granddaughters of a Fulani scholar and grew up in a Muslim community connected by mobility between city and countryside.
