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Project Collaborator

Mayssa Rekhis

Anthropologist and Medical Doctor Independent Scholar

Biography

Mayssa Rekhis is an anthropologist and medical doctor who earned her MD from the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia, and her PhD from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. She is a researcher, educator, and artist working at the intersection of these roles, with a focus on health, social justice, and migration. She has taught at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and the School for International Political Studies at Paris-Est Créteil University, and previously held a faculty position at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she served as Director of the Master’s Programme in Global Health. She has more than a decade of experience working in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), East Africa, and Europe, both as a researcher and practitioner, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as mental health. As a researcher, she explores human experiences of extreme violence, trauma, suffering, and exile, and is interested in the roles of psychiatry and psychotherapy, alongside the mechanisms and processes of subjectivation. Her practice is grounded in interdisciplinarity and collaborations that question, scrutinize, and reimagine borders within—and of—health, healthcare, and healing.

Featured Project

Painting of a humanoid figure against a red/pink background.

The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

2025 – 2027

Projects

The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

Painting of a humanoid figure against a red/pink background.

The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

Medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “the human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. This project will identify a more holistic understanding of “the human” that is neither primarily medical nor...
Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from different perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two ...