About

Saida Hodžić is an associate professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on women’s rights activism, NGO advocacy, humanitarianism, and civic environmental activism. She has conducted ethnographic and autoethnographic research on trans-local women’s rights activism in Ghana, medical knowledge, refuge, asylum, and human rights activism in the United States and Western Europe, as well as civic responses to post-war industrial toxicity and environmental extraction in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her first book, The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs, published by the University of California Press in 2017, explores the effects of Ghanaian advocacy against female genital cutting and its transnational dimensions, challenging Western-centric narratives and emphasizing social justice and historical dispossession. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: Affective Encounters: Humanitarian Afterlives of War and Violence, and For Whom is Africa Rising? Unsettling Transnational Feminism in the 21st Century. Hodžić's work critically rearticulates violence, humanitarianism, and global encounters, and she actively engages in organizing efforts to reorient refugee and asylum studies towards critical perspectives of refuge.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Media studies
• Library science

Selected publications

• Harms of the current global anti-FGM campaign

  Journal of Medical Ethics · 2025-09-14 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Traditional female genital practices, though long-standing in many cultures, have become the focus of an expansive global campaign against 'female genital mutilation' (FGM). In this article, we critically examine the harms produced by the anti-FGM discourse and policies, despite their grounding in human rights and health advocacy. We argue that a ubiquitous 'standard tale' obscures the diversity of practices, meanings and experiences among those affected. This discourse, driven by a heavily racialised and ethnocentric framework, has led to unintended but serious consequences: the erosion of trust in healthcare settings, the silencing of dissenting or nuanced community voices, racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families. Moreover, we highlight a troubling double standard that legitimises comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others. We call for more balanced and evidence-based journalism, policy and public discourse-ones that account for cultural complexity and avoid the reductive and stigmatising force of the term 'mutilation'. A re-evaluation of advocacy strategies is needed to ensure that they do not reproduce the very injustices they aim to challenge.

  PublisherDOI

• Solidarity’s Refusals

  English Language Notes · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract How does a feminist, anti-racist, refugee solidarity group that fights against a necropolitical border regime come to embrace genocidal necropolitics? Telling a story of the necropolitical archipelago at the borderlands of the European Union and the Balkans, feminist dissent and cross-border solidarity, and the emergence of Austro-German feminist alignment with imperial necropolitics, authoritarianism, and genocide itself, this text calls attention to a new formation of imperial feminism: necrofeminism. Necrofeminism is best contrasted with its close cousin militarized feminist humanitarianism. Whereas militarized feminist humanitarianism justifies occupation and war in the name of saving women’s lives and freedoms, necrofeminism is concerned not with freedom or rescue but with legitimizing the politics of death to the point of endorsing genocide. Examining the conditions of possibility for necrofeminist refusals of solidarity, we find the seeds of necrofeminism in racism, civilizational discourses that understand human rights and democracy as inalienable properties of the imperial West, and self-ascribed moral superiority born of ongoing dominance and colonizing projects. We must counter them by revolting against all politics of death, particularly in times when silence orders the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Hosts, Again: From Conditional Inclusion and Liberal Censorship to Togetherness and Creative/Critical Refugee Epistemologies

  Genealogy · 2024-02-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this experimental text that critically juxtaposes autoethnographic narration, reflection, and analysis with theoretical engagements, I suggest that the power dynamics that diminish and dispossess the lives of refugees and other displaced people also constrain and censor critical refugee epistemologies. Refugees are frequently impelled to speak, implored to speak, coached to speak, interrogated and ordered to speak, but on the condition that we consent to having our voices policed. Our narratives are welcomed if they affirm the humanitarian liberal order, but the knowledge we possess challenges it. Presented as benevolent and caring, the incessant demands for refugee stories and trauma erotics are also mechanisms of putting refugees in place: they assign the refugee a subject position of a conditionally accepted narrator who is refused authorship and self-possession. Our narratives fail to count as knowledge unless they are converted into writing by citizen ghost writers or coauthors. And when we refuse to recite trauma stories and instead disrupt the order of things by critically analyzing violent regimes of refuge and liberal complicity, we are censored. Refugees have things to say as ethnographers of their own lives, analysts of upside-down mobility, and critics of violent bureaucracies. This knowledge is needed and wanted. Rather than orienting our work to liberal publics, we are creating alternative, self-authorized structures that uphold displaced people as knowledgeable and world-building subjects, as people able to host others.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Borders, labor, and beyond: Collective reflections on Harsha Walia's writing, activism, and influence on the anthropology of work

  Anthropology of Work Review · 2024 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract Harsha Walia is the winner of the 2022 Conrad M. Arensberg Award given by the Society for the Anthropology of Work for outstanding contributions to the anthropology of work from inside the discipline and beyond. Walia is a scholar, activist, and organizer committed to migrant justice and border abolition. She is also author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Fernwood Press 2021), Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press 2013), as well as numerous journal articles. Walia's analysis and her organizing with No One Is Illegal and other activist communities lay bare why border imperialism continues to feed into worker exploitation and why border abolition is imperative for migrant worker justice. This roundtable discussion is the culmination of collective thinking by anthropologists about how Walia's work has influenced their own, including their research, writing, and advocacy with their interlocutors who live and work across borders.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Feminist Cyberlaw

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.

  DOI

• Precarious Citizenship

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Encounter OneThe thunderous storm catches us unaware on a red rocky road in Bongo, near Ghana's border with Burkina Faso.Agnes, a Filipina South-South volunteer in charge of a basket-weaving project, Constance, a sociologist at the University of Development Studies and at the time my research assistant, and I, an ethnographer studying Ghanaian NGOs and their advocacy against domestic violence and female genital cutting 1 rush to a nearby compound, get off from our bikes, and are welcomed to take shelter until the storm passes.The young family we encounter were in the midst of farm work when the storm came, and are happy to take a break and make our acquaintance.After exchanging greetings, the man drops his hoe, goes to his room, and brings out a picture of himself from the time when he lived in Kumasi. 2 In it, he wears a pressed black suit and a tie, and has a black book in his hand.He does not say much about the photograph and gives no explanation about the book but I presume that it is a Bible and that he was photographed on his way to church.That he shows us the picture by way of an introduction is telling.A picture tells a story, a narrative of a migrant's life (see also Bowles 2017).He wants us to know is that he too, had once been urban and polished.The contrast to his current, weathered, self is striking, and I have to look hard to recognize a semblance.To say that he once lived in Kumasi and wore a suit and carried a book in his hand means that there is more to him than is apparent today, that we cannot, should not think him a mere villager.I am familiar with the gesture.I recall my father and other Bosnian refugees who introduced themselves by retelling a detail from their past, lost lives that were urban and worldly, and so many women domestic workers who were wounded when employers showed them how to turn on electricity or asked if they knew how to operate a washing machine.The hierarchy of human value that places the urban/cosmopolitan above the rural/undeveloped is deeply felt by people whose geographies are cast outside modernity proper. 3I grew up in a country where urbanity conferred value, and where one had to shore it up, carrying its proofs like a passport.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Inheritance of Militarization: Toxic Gifts, Furtive Critique, and Survivance in Post-War Bosnia

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2023-04-05 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To think of Bosnia is to think of war, but militarization precedes and exceeds war, as socialist Yugoslavia located much of its military industry here. The toxic gift of socialist militarization enables people in a small industrial town to survive and stay home at the same time as unfiltered toxic waste makes this home less habitable, poisoning their beloved river. The residents, this article shows, are equally people of the military factory and people of the river, and have to reconcile this dual inheritance. Historicizing the gendered inheritance of socialist militarization and contextualizing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation, this article examines how residents articulate a furtive critique of industrial toxicity in the extended domestic sphere, by which I mean the intimate gatherings in people’s yards and on neighborhood walks and riverside benches that comprise the interstices between public and private where much of Bosnian life is lived. Ethnographically, the article attends to the felt embodiments of dual riverine and militarized inheritance, illuminating furtive complaints of toxicity and poignant fragments of memory told in passing in the extended domestic sphere. Here, residents reclaim their inheritance of the river, planting seeds of dissent and survivance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• For Accountability

  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 8. Feminist Bastards: Toward a Posthumanist Critique of NGOization

  2020-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Blood Loss and Slow Harm in Times of Scarcity

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah Pickman

  Yale University

  9 shared

• Kirin Narayan

  Australian National University

  9 shared

• Kaya Williams

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Ken George

  Yale University

  9 shared

• Duana Fullwiley

  New York University Press

  9 shared

• Ray Craib

  New York University Press

  9 shared

• Setefanus Suprajitno

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Namita Vijay Dharia

  Cornell University

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize by the Association for Feminist…
• Amaury Talbot Book Prize for African Anthropology by the Roy…
• Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social S…
• Rosenthal Advancement of College of Arts and Sciences Women…
• Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Research Grant