Ali Venir is a PhD researcher at the University of Utrecht. They are completing their PhD in Cultural Anthropology, focusing on queer networks of care and queer mutual aid during the covid-19 pandemic in Bologna, Italy, with a theoretical focus on queer materialism, social reproduction, care, affect, consent.

Their thesis explores how queer mutual aid and queer networks of care relate to the nuclear family, the State and (the dismantling) of welfare systems, capitalist subsumption of caring practices. Combining feminist theories of social reproduction and ethics of care, their research aims to think of  queer forms of care enacted in mutual aid structures (“mutualismo queer”) as affectively dense and complicated, as materially and economically situated, as relating to shared vulnerability and precarity. Situating their research within the framework of the covid-19 pandemic, they also frame care as connecting of bodily vulnerability with issues of consent, beyond the merely sexual sphere.

Before their PhD, they received their Research Master of Sciences in Cultural Anthropology: Sociocultural transformations at Utrecht University and their Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at the University of York.

Research and teaching interests:

Social movements, queer theory, queer materialism, social reproduction theory, transfeminism, feminist anthropology, sexuality.