Jasmine Ariel Keyes

Graduate Student

Jasmine Ariel Keyes is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in cultural anthropology at Vanderbilt University. In her undergraduate alma mater, Agnes Scott College, she graduated Magna Cum Laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa. She completed a research project entitled “Race and The Medical System: The Influence of Prejudice and Neocolonialism on Racial Health Disparities in American Society,” which examined the impact of neocolonial structures within America on the health outcomes of African Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. For her senior thesis titled “Race and Embodiment: The Lived Experiences of African American Women in Connection to Racialized and Gendered Historical Contexts in Healthcare Settings,” she analyzed the ways in which power dynamics and surveillance within clinical encounters shape perceptions of self among African American women.

 

Jasmine aims to critically dissect manifestations of embodied difference within clinical encounters. Her research interest extends to the mediations of otherness and bodily knowledge, tracing a continuum from colonial legacies to contemporary experiences. Jasmine focuses on the partitioning of Black bodies through discourses of death, surveillance, and pain, emphasizing the body’s multiple existences as a medical specimen and commodified entity within late-stage capitalism. Drawing inspiration from plantation geographies, hospice centers, gravesites, and the body itself, she is captivated by sites of breach and repair, relating them to ontological dimensions of Blackness in America. Whether in totality or fragmented, the body is a medium inscribed with the interplay of historical legacies, sociopolitical dynamics, evolving medico-legal paradigms, and the localized resilience of Black agency.