Emily Williamson Ibrahim

Graduated Summer 2022

Research Interests

Ghana, West Africa, Zongo, belonging, mobility, place

Website

emilywilliamsonibrahim.com

About

Emily Williamson Ibrahim is a PhD student in anthropology at Boston University. Her current research focuses on questions of belonging, mobility, and strangerhood among “zongos,” the name used to describe predominantly Muslim urban settlements in Ghana, West Africa. Emily holds a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Virginia (UVA), and an undergraduate degree in Art History from Colby College. Emily has also worked as an architect in Washington, DC, collaborated on cultural heritage projects in Ghana, Peru, and Haiti, has taught at Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is a co-founder of the nonprofit organization called the “Zongo Story Project” (www.zongostoryproject.com) in which she works with students in Ghana to write, illustrate, and tell stories.

Emily has a lasting commitment to researching and working with communities in Ghana. With over ten years of intermittent engagement with zongo residents as a teacher, designer, landscape heritage consultant, and anthropologist, she has gained cultural literacy and built trusted relationships among zongos in Accra, Cape Coast, Elmina, Salt Pond, Kumasi, Techiman, Wa, and the Bronx, New York. In graduate school at UVA, she worked with the local non-profit Ghanaian Heritage Conservation Trust, Metropolitan Assembly, and Cape Coast zongo to design and implement a long-term community-based project aiming to mutually improve their water infrastructure and quality of life. As a graduate student at MIT, she traveled the historic Black Volta Islamic trade route linking zongos from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel to tell a nuanced historical account of these zongos’ socio-spatial evolution. And on a much smaller scale, she worked collaboratively with the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board and International Monetary Fund, to interview residents and survey existing Asante religious shrine buildings so as to develop a long-term, community-based preservation plan for the city of Kumasi.

Most recently, as a graduate student in anthropology at Boston University, she has become proficient in the Hausa language and recently completed her ethnographic fieldwork (2018-2020) in Ghana. A few of Emily’s publications include: a Review of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere, by Prita Meier (H-AMCA: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, 2017); “Understanding the Zongo: socio-spatial processes of marginalization in Ghana.” (The African Metropolis edited by Toyin Falola and Bisola Falola, 2017), and “Zongo: Water Infrastructure and Public Life” (University of Chicago Art Journal, 2010).

Awards

• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (2018-2020)
• Muslim Studies Fellowship, Boston University
• Hariri Institute, Digital Software Development Grant, Boston University
• Colloquium Fellow, Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA)
• Long-Term Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (GRAF), Boston University
• Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship (FLAS), Boston University
• Foreign Language and Area Studies Annual Fellowship (FLAS), Boston University
• Best Children’s Book for Young Readers, Children’s Africana Book Award

Publications

• Review of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere, by Prita Meier. H-AMCA: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, 2017. (peer-reviewed)
• “Understanding the Zongo: socio-spatial processes of marginalization in Ghana.” In The African Metropolis: Struggles Over Urban Space, Citizenship, and Rights to the City, edited by Toyin Falola and Bisola Falola. New York: Routledge Press, 2017. (peer-reviewed)
• “Reflections on ‘Gizo-Gizo: A Tale from the Zongo Lagoon’.”African Studies Center Newsletter, July 2017, Boston University, African Studies Center.
• Gizo-Gizo: A Tale from the Zongo Lagoon. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2016.