Biography
Raphaëlle Rabanes is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A sociocultural medical anthropologist with dual training in clinical psychology, her work mobilizes Anthropology, Black Studies and Disability Studies to focus on health, race, embodiment, and the long shadow of history in French/Caribbean Guadeloupe. Her work has been published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Somatosphere, and Esclavages & Post-Esclavages. Her research has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, among others.
Research Interests
My first book manuscript, provisionally titled Movements of Repair: Up Against the In-durable present in French Caribbean Guadeloupe, centers community responses to health and racial inequities in postcolonial Guadeloupe. I trace how people—in parallel to symbolic and material demands for reparations for slavery articulated to the French state—take stock of structural inequities and counter their multiform manifestations in everyday life through a series of embodied responses.
Between 2023 and 2025, I returned to the University Hospital of Guadeloupe (where I had conducted ethnographic research for my first project) to work as the first clinical psychologist of the Intensive Care Unit. My second project builds on this experience and focusses on the negotiation of end-of-life care and organ donation amidst social debates about bioethics, assisted death, and hospital mistrust.
Education
PhD, Medical Anthropology Joint Program, University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco
Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, Black Studies, University of California Santa Barbara
MA, Psychoanalytic Studies, Université Paris Cité (formerly Université Paris Diderot)
BA-MA, Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology, Université Paris Cité (formerly Université Paris Diderot) [5-year profesional degree with required internships, leading to licensure as clinical psychologist in France]
Courses Taught
Fall 2026:
ANTH 379: Medical Anthropology - Anthropology of Care
ANTH 515: Medical Anthrology Theory
Spring 2027:
ANTH 199: Introduction to Medical Anthropology
ANTH 499: Repair, Reparations, and the Afterlives of History
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Recent Publications
Rabanes, R. M. (2026). Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post-stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 40(1), Article e70042. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70042
Rabanes, R. (2024). Review: N. Charles' Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 38(1), 129-131. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12833
Rabanes, R., & Chevry, D. (2022). Le mas comme espace de transformation: Regards croisés sur la dimension réparative du carnaval en Guadeloupe. Esclavages & Post-esclavages, (7). https://doi.org/10.4000/slaveries.7383