Jasmine Kelekay

Jasmine Kelekay

Jasmine Kelekay is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work examines the ways in which ideas about Blackness are both circulated globally and shaped by local contexts, histories, and material conditions, with a focus on the Nordic context. Situated at the intersection of African diaspora studies, sociology, critical criminology, and cultural studies, Kelekay employs interdisciplinary methods informed by Black/Afrofeminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Her current book project investigates the racialized politics of crime control in the Swedish welfare state by examining how Black communities in Sweden are targeted by, experience, navigate, and resist racialized policing. Grounded in community-engaged Black feminist ethnography, Kelekay illustrates how Afro-Swedish communities are criminalized through intersecting logics of antiblackness, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant racism, revealing how Blackness is policed at the intersections of the various modalities through which it is lived. Her work has been published in journals including Annual Review of Sociology, City & Community, Social Currents, and Open Cultural Studies. Forthcoming works include the co-authored article Letter Writing as Counter Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice," to be published in Meridians.

Kelekay earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Sociology with a designated emphasis in Black Studies. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. As an Afro-Finland-Swedish scholar, Kelekay is publicly engaged in both Sweden and Finland, where she also continues to work with community organizations and activists.