Beth Packer, Phd Email & Phone Number

I am a qualitative researcher, writer and educator specializing in gender equality with over fifteen years of experience in research design and conducting fieldwork with vulnerable populations predominantly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Passionate about promoting social justice through social research and higher education, I have mentored and taught undergraduate and master’s students in the United States, France and Senegal. I am the author of several peer reviewed articles on gender dynamics and alternative sexualities in West Africa and the Muslim World. I have also published a case study on innovative community outreach and development education models in Senegal.A native English speaker, fluent in French with dual American/French citizenship, I was trained as a sociologist both in the United States and France. From 2013-2017 I was a visiting graduate student researcher at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley and received my PhD in Sociology in April 2019 from the École Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales in Paris, France.My current research explores women’s soccer in urban Senegal as a site of transformational gender politics at the intersection of progressive Sufi morality and the ethos of sporting cultures. In urban Senegal, women who play soccer are often considered deviant because of their subversive gender performances both on and off the field. I argue that rather than try to neutralize or reverse the stigma attached to this identity, many of these women embrace their stigma as a form of redemptive suffering which brings them closer to God. These findings contribute new knowledge to the study of social stigma and normativity by bringing to light alternative frameworks for meaning making around deviance. Exploring the ways in which female soccer players challenge the normative relationship between gender, sex and sexuality while crafting themselves as ethical Muslims, my research pushes back against western-centric secular assumptions about queerness, Muslim women, power, and resistance.