Affiliation Years
2021-2022
Department:
Anthropology
Dissertation Title
In the Wake of Forced Removal: Heritage Activism and Land Rights in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg

Jasmine Reid is a student, a photographer, a painter, and a storyteller. She is currently a Stanford Anthropology PhD candidate who specializes in heritage studies and post-colonial land rights. Her research explores the role that two Johannesburg community museums play in the political landscape of land rights. Specifically, she follows the commemorative and activistic profiles of these museums, as they both commemorate communities forcibly displaced under apartheid and garner influence with government officials, private developers, citizen action groups, and other heritage practitioners to shape Johannesburg into a spatially-just metropolis. Her work consequently intervenes in the broader discussion about settler colonial land restitution as it engages with the materiality of the contested city and the lived experiences of those who currently reside there, all through the lens of the community museum.

In 2017, she received her Master’s in Anthropology from Stanford. Prior to Stanford, she graduated from Yale University with a BA in Anthropology and African Studies in 2013. After college, she worked for nine months in a South African museum, where she curated photographic exhibitions and produced a film about Johannesburg nuns who resisted apartheid-era forced removals in the 1950s and 1960s. She also worked for two years at LIFT-DC, a social services agency in Washington, DC, that provided wraparound services to homeless and near-homeless individuals. Outside of the academy, Jasmine operates as the Hyphenated Servant, a justice-oriented artist who paints, writes, and sells travel photography.