Raphaëlle Rabanes

Raphaëlle Rabanes is a sociocultural and critical medical anthropologist with dual training in clinical psychology. Her work mobilizes Anthropology, Black Studies and Disability Studies to examine health, structural racism, embodiment, and the long shadow of history in the African Diaspora. Her first book manuscript, Movements of Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in French Caribbean Guadeloupe, examines how Afro-descendant Guadeloupeans take stock of health and racial inequities and foster strategies of individual and collective repair. Building on collaborative ethnographic work since 2015, Movements of Repair brings together efforts by Guadeloupean patients, health workers, choreographers, and memorial activists to transform their conditions of existence while encountering a series of limitations in the micro and the macro structures of their lives.

Before joining UIUC, Dr. Rabanes was Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington Seattle, where she remains Affiliated Graduate Faculty. She also worked as the first clinical psychologist of the Intensive Care Unit of the University Hospital Center of Guadeloupe. Between 2023 and 2025, as a clinician-scholar, she implemented therapeutic processes to support patients, families, and health workers in intensive care.  Her second project builds on this experience and focusses on the negotiation of end-of-life care and organ procurement amidst social debates about bioethics, assisted death, and hospital mistrust.

Dr. Rabanes’ research informs her teaching. As a critical medical anthropologist and Disability Studies scholar, she invites students to envision an integrative approach to health, interrogate the limits to biomedical fraimings, and encompass collective and psychic dimensions. As a Caribbeanist and Black Studies scholar, her courses draw attention to the afterlives of slavery, how societies remain structured by racialization, and the many practices of resistance, repair, and transformation, both in everyday life and in social movements.