Dominique Somda

Dominique Somda is a sociocultural anthropologist trained in France; she received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, where she was a member of the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative. As a postdoctoral researcher, she held visiting positions at the Fondation des Maisons des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and the London School of Economics. She later taught anthropology as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Reed College in Portland, Oregon. More recently, she was a traveling faculty with the comparative study abroad programs IHP Cities and IHP Human Rights (School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont). Her work focuses on how inequality − or conversely egalitarianism − emerges through everyday practices, a thematic interest that has also led her to engage with the anthropology of slavery, democracy, Christianity, and feminist and postcolonial studies. Her regional focus is Madagascar. At HUMA, she explores the contributions of Christian African churches to the debates on the introduction of AI and the digital transformation of healthcare.