Kauthar Khamis, Beauty Practices: A Modality of Religious Co-existence Amongst Christian and Muslim Women in Madina

Kauthar Khamis is a PhD candidate in the Madina Project which is part of the research programme Religious Matters in an Entangled World, lead by Prof. Birgit Meyer at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on beauty practices amongst Christian and Muslim women in Madina Zongo, a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community in Ghana’s capital city. She is interested in how women from diverse religious and social backgrounds imitate each other’s beauty practices in their everyday encounters and its effects on their relationship. She uses beauty salons as her entry point to investigate how Christian and Muslim women negotiate their differences in the process of beautifying themselves. The research further explores the contestations about Islamic fashion in Ghana’s public institutions as well as why women resort to sexual beauty as a form of transactional sex in the Zongo.