Biography
Raphaëlle Rabanes is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition to her PhD in Medical Anthropology (UC Berkeley-UCSF), she is also trained in Black Studies (pre-doctoral fellow, University of California Santa Barbara), Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Paris Cité). Her work brings together Anthropology, Black Studies and Disability Studies to focus on health, race, embodiment, and the long shadow of history in the French Caribbean.
Research Interests
My first book manuscript, Movements of Repair: Memory, Embodiment and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean, centers community responses to health and racial inequities in the French Caribbean archipelago of 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
Medical Anthropology, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Grants
Research supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Department of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Recent Publications
Rabanes, R. M. (2025). Enduring and the horizon of repair: French Caribbean post-stroke rehabilitation amid health inequity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Advance online publication. 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