Jasmijn Rana is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her research is characterised by a critical look at the contemporary society in which she examines the interplay of embodied processes of identification and discursive classification systems. She has published on Muslim women, sports, diversity in cultural heritage, embodiment, and decolonizing anthropology. Jasmijn is Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Diversity Outdoors: Embodied Ethnoracial Inequalities and Outdoor Recreation in Europe”.

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Jasmijn Rana is a social and cultural anthropologist trained at University of Amsterdam (BSc, MSc) and Freie Universitaet Berlin (PhD). Her research is characterised by a critical look at the contemporary society in which she examines the interplay of embodied processes of identification and discursive classification systems.

She coordinates the CADS Research Cluster ‘'People, Power and Diversity'', serves as graduate mentor at the institute and as co-lead of the Leiden University Research Theme Inequalities.

Research

Jasmijn is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Diversity Outdoors: Embodied Ethnoracial Inequalities and Outdoor Recreation in Europe, which undertakes a comparative ethnographic study of groups and activities that counter the lack of diversity in outdoor recreation and theorizes ethnoracial embodiment.

Jasmijn is also a co-coordinator and senior researcher in the project At Home Otherwise: Rethinking Heritage Through Diversity, which investigates diversifying and democratizing heritage through practices of “home-making”.

From September 2022 to August 2024, Jasmijn was a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (2022-2023) and Leiden University (2023-2024) with the project Embodiment of Racialization: Running Muslim Women and the Sense of Non-Belonging. This ethnographic research takes recreational running as an angle to investigate the effects of racialization on the relation to one’s own body, environment, and to other people.

In 2022, her monograph Punching Back: Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women Only Kickboxing was published by Berghahn Books. She is currently pursuing a second book project on racial embodiment and possibilities of play among Muslim runners.