JACQUELIN KATANEKSZA is a Zimbabwean Ph.D. candidate in Public and Urban Policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy. Her work explores historical and contemporary formations of subaltern subjectivities and how inter-temporal intersections have been operationalized to disrupt dominant power structures.

Jacquelin’s goal as a scholar-activist and critical researcher is to validate and advance multiple voices, realities, and knowledges. Her personal biography as a mixed-heritage woman of color is a complement to the hybridized theoretical and concrete contributions she endeavors to make in her research and her activism. Her research examines how Zimbabwean activists are confronting the current political regime, and also legacies of colonialism and modernity as they attempt to imagine and construct a postcolonial, post-Mugabe future. She also re-centers the Southern African humanist philosophy Ubuntu/Nhimbe by using its foundational principles to develop an emancipatory framework for individual and societal wellbeing. Finally, she aims to co-design a local-level participatory economic system which will focus on direct citizen contribution, equity, solidarity and ecological sustainability. By using a methodological pluralism that employs participatory action research, critical ethnography and an iterative and evolving decolonial design, her project points to a possibility for hybrid, transcultural forms of knowledge and alternative imaginaries of the Zimbabwean future.