Aminata Ndow is a Belgian-Gambian researcher, community organizer and filmmaker committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Antwerp, a Master’s degree in History from Ghent University and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Harvard University. As a PhD Candidate she studies the dictatorship and current transitional justice process in The Gambia (1994-present). Specifically, she studies how now-adult children of victims of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings experience mourning when mortuary rites for the dead are absent, rituals for mourning can’t be fulfilled and proper integration of the deceased into the memory of a community is not possible. This project is 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.

Research interests: African studies; transitional justice; violence and aftermath; death and mourning; memory and identity; childhood and youth; kinship; participatory visual methods; hermeneutic phenomenology; research ethics.