Moad Musbahi is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He researches the entanglements between bodily ailments, oral performance and financial relations within communities who claim ancestral belonging across Algeria, Libya, Niger and Mali. Taking the title, the ‘Right to Return’, his dissertation project considers how the voice’s wounding, funerary rites and percussive practices are used to articulate demands for land, and how these trouble anthropological understandings of the economic.  

As part of his research within African and African American studies, he investigates the reification of racial difference, and the transnational circulation of credit across the Sahara as it is evidenced in sonic practices such as legal utterances and Sufi rituals.

He is a member of PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an experimental sound ensemble and outside Princeton, he is an artist with recent work presented at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah (2024);); MoMA, New York (2023); Kunstverein, Hamburg, (2023); 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, (2023); and 7th Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2022) and co-directs the ‘Taught 2 Travel’ programme with the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin and RAW Material Company, Dakar.