Dr Zoë Goodman is an anthropologist and facilitator with 15 years of experience at top universities, non-profit organizations and the UN. She has led independent and collaborative research projects in the UK, East Africa, West Africa and Central Asia, investigating issues that range from migration and learning opportunities to health and food systems.

Zoë has been doing research in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa since 2013. She was recently awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Catalyst Grant from the UK’s Research and Innovation funding body (UKRI), for a project entitled ‘Theatre-making in careless times: Arts-based approaches to care in Mombasa, Kenya’. Working in close partnership with Jukwaa Arts Productions, a Mombasa-based performing arts company, the project uses participatory theatre and arts-based workshops to examine experiences of care in the health sector along the Kenyan coast. Participatory theatre productions will bring together healthcare professionals and ordinary people to share experiences of care and carelessness, as well as put forward community-generated solutions to enduring health challenges.

Zoë is committed to arts-based and embodied approaches to care and social justice, and recently launched a facilitation practice, Rebellious Care: Caring for ourselves + each other through the body. Rebellious Care offers creative and body-centred workshops to help university staff, researchers and students to disrupt anxiety, discrimination, burnout and isolation. Rebellious Care workshops offer participants simple tools to promote wellbeing and collective accountability structures within university spaces.

Zoë is currently the Just Futures Programme Manager for the ‘Joy as Resistance’ Residency at the Science Gallery London, part of King’s. Over the next 6 months she will be supporting the inspiring collective Hey, Sis. to use creative research methods to explore how sisterhood and joy can generate liberatory futures – especially for womxn and girls with global majority roots in South London. The Residency is part of an ESRC-funded project of the Visual Embodied Research Network at King’s.

One of Zoë’s previous research projects examined claims about fake COVID-19 vaccines in Mombasa, as part of the Wellcome-Trust Funded grant ‘What’s at stake in the fake? Indian pharmaceuticals, African markets and Global Health’. This research explored Mombasans’ unanswered questions about vaccines and their concerns that the jabs had been intentionally designed to harm Africans and Muslims, rather than treat COVID-19. While such claims are frequently dismissed as outlandish conspiracies, Zoë’s work shows that vaccine rumours expose and critique enduring forms of structural violence, such as racism and Islamophobia.

Before joining King’s, Zoë worked at SOAS – where she co-convened the postgraduate programme in Migration & Diaspora Studies – as well as at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden and the University of Warwick. She has consulted for the World Bank, UNCTAD and various NGOs.

Research

• Care and carelessness
• Vaccine hesitancy & distrust
• Fakes and misinformation
• Arts-based & body-centred methods
• African cities
• Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms
• South Asian diasporas
• Public engagement

Further details

See Zoë's research profile