Leyya Hoosen

Dr. Hoosen is a Socio-Cultural Digital Anthropologist, specialising in critical approaches to gender, decolonial, and religion studies. Her research explores what it means to be a “Muslim woman” in South Africa in the digital age. She considers what Muslimness and Religiosity mean, how these concepts inform our processes of identification, and how access to digital platforms allows new avenues for engaging these concepts.

Dr. Hoosen has held fellowships with the Wadsworth African Fellowship (supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the leading international funder of cutting-edge research in Anthropology), Social Sciences Research Council, Re-Centring Afro-Asia Program, and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. As a senior Writing Fellow with the Wits Writing Centre, she infuses her pedagogy with accessible and writing-intensive learning. She works on creating and sustaining pipelines for scholars of colour within the academy and has worked with and supervised student cohorts from undergraduate through to doctoral programs across the humanities.