Dr Summer Qassim
- Affiliated Researcher
- Affiliated Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies
Contact
About
I am a political and feminist anthropologist whose work examines how gendered political subjectivities are formed through intimate pedagogies, digital infrastructures, and practices of ethical self-cultivation. I work at the intersection of political anthropology, feminist theory, and the anthropology of ethics, with a particular interest in how women negotiate and challenge relationality outside “normative” liberal frameworks.
My research has explored emerging forms of personhood among cosmopolitan Western women who consciously embrace femininity as an aspirational mode of relational and ethical life, using these practices to interrogate how feminist theory itself becomes lived and felt as moral and affective norms. My book project, Being Good Women: The Ethics of Femininity, Digital Intimacy, and the Politics of the Self, builds on this research to theorise how intimate pedagogies generate new forms of ethical labour and political subjectivity, reshaping core analytical categories across feminist and political anthropology.
I am currently an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology and a Supervisor at the Centre for Gender Studies. I also convene a dedicated Digital Ethnography module, combining theory and practice, for Cambridge Research Methods (CaRM, formerly SSRMP). Previously, I was a Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, where I also earned my PhD.
Before undertaking my doctoral studies, I completed an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, an MA in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University (NYU), and a BA in Political Science with a focus on Middle Eastern History and Islamic Law at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I have conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork with an all-female Sufi group in Damascus, Syria, supported by a Fulbright grant, and have studied both Classical and Modern Standard Arabic at the University of Damascus and the American University of Beirut, attaining near-native fluency in Levantine Colloquial Arabic.
I have extensive experience living, researching, and teaching in the Levant (Syria and Lebanon) and in Pakistan. These experiences continue to inform my comparative approach to gender, ethics, and political life, and underpin my long-term aim of developing cross-cultural perspectives that connect my current research with broader anthropological debates.
Research
Research interests
- Anthropology of ethics
- Digital anthropology
- Feminist and queer theory
- Gender
- Sexuality and personhood
- Feminism and political subjectivity
- Comparative frameworks
My doctoral research at Cambridge brought together the anthropology of ethics and digital anthropology through an in-depth study of the lived practices of a large, geographically dispersed community of women. I explored how their discursive and ethical pedagogies—developed and circulated within shared online spaces—served the cultivation of idealized offline selves. The project was initially conceived to understand the enduring appeal of normative kinship models among women who identify as living in the West and/or subscribing to Western ideals of companionate marriage, and to compare these formations with self-consciously “traditional” projects of ethical self-cultivation, such as the women’s Islamic piety movements influentially documented by Saba Mahmood.
My current research extends this comparative inquiry to examine its political implications, particularly the recognition that feminism itself has generated norms of personhood that not all women experience as liberatory across different social and cultural contexts. This has led me to work on a broader set of questions: What intellectual and political moves must the social sciences now make, having endorsed gender fluidity models as the dominant framework over the past few decades? These commitments have often reflected a progressive politics of inclusion—one that often frames male–female dichotomies as inherently exclusionary or regressive. The ethnographic presence of both the sex-positive feminist communities of my doctoral research and the politically liberal ethos shaping contemporary trans-advocacy, for example, invite a reassessment of this oversubscription.
My current project is to consider how commitments to fluidity have become embedded in politics, activism, and academic discourse alike, and to ask what forms of power, normativity, and exclusion might be sustained or experienced, affectively, by treating fluidity itself as the most ethical or emancipatory stance. This critical reflection, I suggest, opens the possibility for a more genuinely inclusive and reflexive theoretical framework.
Publications
Journal Articles (Peer Reviewed)
- Qassim, S. 2024. “Avatar, Personified: Split Personhood on an Ethical Online Support Group.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 14(1): 191-204.
Book Chapters
- Qassim, S. 2017. “Boys Will Be Boys, So Girls Will Be Girls: The Resurgence of Femininity Among Single Women.” In Advances in Gender Research, 24: 93-113.
Book Reviews
- Qassim, S. (forthcoming December 2025). Baldacchino, J.P. & Houston, C. (eds) 2024. Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves Across Cultures. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO).
Talks Given
- 2019. Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG) Ethics Panel I, Oxford, UK
- 2022. Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG) "Ethical Life as Virtual Reality" Oxford, UK
Teaching and supervision
Undergraduate Supervision
- SAN1 – Social Anthropology: The Comparative Perspective
- SAN2 – The Foundations of Social Life
- SAN5 – Ethical Life and the Anthropology of the Subject
- SAN7 Ethnographic Methods and Writing
- SAN 11 Digital, visual, and auditory worlds
- Dissertations
Undergraduate Lecturing
- SAN 3 Anthropological theory and methods
Postgraduate Lecturing
- Cambridge Research Methods (CaRM) Digital ethnographic methods
Postgraduate Supervision
- Currently supervising dissertations and accepting MPhil students in social anthropology, gender studies, and digital research