Ulla Ali (she/her) is a master’s student in Arab Studies at Georgetown University, where her research examines gender, resource economies, and political power in Sudan. Her thesis project draws on decolonial feminist theory to analyze how Sudanese women’s material and symbolic relationships to gold shape competing claims to authority across class lines, from the 2019 revolution’s Kandaka icon to artisanal miners and displaced refugees. She has conducted field interviews in Saudi Arabia with Sudanese refugee women, artisanal workers, and community representatives, with further interviews underway in Egypt. Prior to Georgetown, she interned with the U.S. Department of State, the Council of Europe, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, where she authored a report on Sudan’s humanitarian situation submitted to the Secretary-General. She holds a B.A. in International Relations and French and Francophone Studies from Syracuse University, and is proficient in Arabic and French.
Project: Hills of Gold, Hearts of Rebellion: Gendered Claims to Power in Sudan’s Gold Economy
Since 2019, Sudan’s revolution and the war that followed it have unfolded alongside a decentralized gold economy that now produces most of the country’s export wealth. This project asks how Sudanese women’s relationships to gold, as jewelry, inheritance, and physical labor, shape their competing claims to political power, depending on their class position. Comparing three groups of women, the urban revolutionary icon whose gold jewelry became a symbol of the 2019 uprising, artisanal women miners who produce the majority of Sudan’s gold under conditions the state labels “informal,” and displaced refugee women who carry gold across borders as a form of survival currency, the project asks what each group’s relationship to gold reveals about power, labor, and authority in a collapsing state. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory, particularly María Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender and Maylei Blackwell’s concept of retrofitted memory, the project argues that Sudanese women reclaim historical symbols of authority, like the ancient Nubian Kandaka, in ways that differ sharply depending on class and regional position. It further argues that the same “informal” classification that lets Sudan’s military avoid financial accountability for its gold wealth also renders women’s labor in that economy invisible to the state’s official records. Based on field interviews conducted in Saudi Arabia with Sudanese refugee women, artisanal workers, and community representatives, with additional interviews underway in Egypt, this project combines ethnographic and archival methods to recover a gendered history of gold that Sudan’s official records were never built to capture. In doing so, it aims to contribute to broader conversations about how gender, race, and class shape resource economies and postcolonial state power beyond Sudan.