Nancy Hakizimana

I am a Rwandan South African PhD candidate in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where my research explores the entrepreneurship of Black hairdressers in Amsterdam. I hold a Bachelor's, Honours (cum laude), and a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In a world where race, gender, and migration continue to shape who is seen, heard, and valued, my work focuses on the everyday spaces where visibility and racial meaning converge. These are the sites where Eurocentric ideas that have historically pathologised Blackness and inscribed racial meaning onto the body are challenged and reimagined. It is from within these spaces of everyday negotiation that my research takes shape. 

My PhD project examines the entrepreneurial worlds of Black women hairdressers in Amsterdam. Through ethnographic fieldwork in home and commercial salons, I explore how hairdressers transform their entrepreneurship into acts of world-making. Their salons are not only workplaces but also intimate social spaces where identity and culture are continually remade. The study investigates how these women navigate the intersectional challenges they face as Black women and professionals in the Netherlands, while positioning Black hair practices as forms of political and economic agency. In my work, hair functions as both material and metaphor, connecting histories of survival and pride.

Broadly, my research interests lie in Black feminist thought, decoloniality, entrepreneurship and the anthropology of work. At its core, my work celebrates Blackness in its everyday beauty as a living, embodied archive of resistance and joy. 

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