Laurian Bowles [phonetically: Law-ree-in Bowls] is the Vann Professor of Racial Justice and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Davidson College, where she also serves as chair of the Anthropology Department. Bowles is also the director of the Davidson in Ghana summer study abroad program at Davidson College and is an associate editor at American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. Bowles is a cultural anthropologist who researches, writes, and teaches about social mobility, race and gender using visual methodologies with women laborers in Ghana and the African diaspora. Her book, Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness and Modernity in Accra, published by Penn Press in 2025, examine the lives of women head porters, to better understand how social anxieties about modernity and development are enacted and expressed in contemporary Ghana. Bowles’s work attends to how women organize and shows up in ordinary forms of mobilization and refusals in public and intimate spaces. Also interested in the haptic and tactile value of photographs and the visual archives of pictures as artifacts, Bowles writes about the way in which race, class, and queerness coalesce in visual storytelling. This work has been published in Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, and African Arts and Ghanaian public radio. A proud third generation Philadelphian by way of the Carolinas and Georgia, Laurian Bowles currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Headstrong explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, this ethnography shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into view how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialism and enslavement, undergirds accumulation in Ghana. Situated within a fugitive anthropology that refuses extractive research and centers Black women’s embodied knowledge, the book treats kayayei not as objects of study but as co-theorists of urban life, labor, and desire. Through ethnographic storytelling, Headstrong accompanies women through their work as human transporters at Ghanaian markets, tracing how they cultivate practices of flight—creative reappropriations of public spaces as private sanctuaries and reimagining of expected social relations through liberatory same-sex intimacies—contesting the victimhood narratives projected onto African women. Attentive to the gendered and racialized vulnerabilities of fieldwork, Headstrong also models a community-oriented research praxis that makes visible the emotional and physical costs of the gig economy in Africa. It further demonstrates how the infrastructure challenges of Accra intersect with the affective qualities of antiblackness in a racially homogeneous nation show how these qualities are often sutured to everyday discourse, embedded in development agendas, as well as privately expressed anxieties about labor, gender, and sexuality. Grounded in African feminist theories and Black feminist ethnography, Headstrong centers kayayei, who are often perceived as obstacles to progress and modernity, as key figures for understanding urban Ghana’s aspirations about what it means to be a modern African city.