Ramon de Haan

Ramon de Haan (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at The New School currently conducting fieldwork abroad through the ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His research focuses on the relation between the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, reparations activisms, and post-repair futures of Black liberation in the Black Dutch diaspora. He looks specifically at local activists in Suriname, Curaçao, and the Netherlands, and their transnational diasporic collaborations. This anthropology dissertation project uses activist ethnography in these three locations to answer the question: What does the movement of repair activisms in the Afro-Dutch diaspora reveal about new developments in global Black liberation politics? This project experiments with doing anthropology differently even in dissertation research by collaborating with community partners within and outside this diaspora, creating accessible and understandable forms of publication for the general public, and leveraging the multisited methods. Transforming the goals of anthropology, this project uses Black feminist, abolitionist theory and methods to support these activists and their work. Ultimately, this research hopes to change anthropology into a useful tool for building different worlds and Black futures of liberation.

With mixed Afro-Surinamese and white Dutch roots, Ramon grew up in the Netherlands, completing a liberal arts honors degree at the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam before coming to New York for graduate school in 2015. He remains politically active in the Netherlands as an activist for the radical left party BIJ1, serving as a founding board member of the party’s international bureau (the Dumont-Huiswoud Foundation). For more information see ramonanthro.com.