About

Chelsi West Ohueri is an Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic interests include race and racialization, nations and nationalism, medical anthropology, Romani Studies, ethnographic writing, and regional focuses such as Albania, the Balkans, and the US South. Her work encompasses a broad range of topics within these areas, contributing to the understanding of social and cultural dynamics through ethnographic research. As a graduate advisor, she also plays a key role in mentoring students within her department.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Nursing
• Gerontology
• Gender studies
• History
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Peripheral Whiteness

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines racialization and race-making through the analytic of peripheral whiteness. It assesses what it means to long for whiteness as shaped by Albania's particular histories of imperialism and state socialism, and contemporary aspirations for European Union membership, as well as the angst produced by this longing for what people consider to be full inclusion within Europe. Peripheral whiteness further considers whiteness as strategic, as whiteness itself does what ethnicity cannot do, in terms of demonstrating what it means to be or become European. The chapter then interrogates how national narratives serve as a tool for Albanians to craft a white European racial belonging. It presents ethnographic data captured from interviews with Albanians who at one point had emigrated to Greece and returned to Albania following the 2008 financial crisis. The chapter also looks at more recent local manifestations of whiteness as it pertains to the relationships between Albanians, Roma, and Egyptians, whereby Albanians are racialized as “white” while Roma and Egyptians are racialized as “black.”

  PublisherDOI

• Racial Logics of Antiblackness and Anti-Romani Racism: A Relational Analysis

  Slavic Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Building on my research about racialization and marginalization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism, asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeast Europe and Europe as a whole. This paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses that move past race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.

  PublisherDOI

• On Blackness

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter evaluates blackness and the racialization of Roma and Balkan Egyptians in Albania. The story of blackness is complex and imbricated, involving multiple names, but the construction of these naming practices yields insight into historical and ongoing processes that have racialized Roma and Egyptians outside of whiteness, Europeanness, and Albanianness. Logics of blackness, and further, antiblackness do in fact shape race-making in Albania, but the formations of blackness emerge differently for these two social groups. The chapter then historically and ethnographically traces race through six connected key terms of “black” subjectivities: <italic>arixhi</italic> (bear tamer), <italic>gabel</italic> (stranger), <italic>Roma</italic> (“man” or “person” in Romani language), <italic>jevg</italic> (deriving from the term <italic>jevgjit</italic> , a variation of “Egypt”), <italic>Egjiptian</italic> (Egyptian), and finally <italic>dorë e zezë</italic> (“black hands” or “black side”). By exploring these terms, it reveals what local racialization processes can illustrate about the ways that race travels and shapes social worlds.

  PublisherDOI

• The Trial of the Anthropologist

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter begins by recounting the author's experience on a national Albanian TV show in 2013. What was initially planned as a conversation about the author's research quickly morphed into a vivid exchange with the show's host and a local psychologist about racism versus ignorance, during which the author was frequently asked why they thought Albanians were racist. The chapter then explores the cultural forms of respect and hospitality in relation to race in Albania, and the broader region of Eastern Europe. It examines how Albanian collective identity is often understood and articulated as a particular posture toward guests, dispositions thought to be naturally rooted in honor, hospitality, and respect. The practices of hospitality, as shaped by histories of imagined racial utopias, may obscure the ways that racialization has historically operated and continues to operate in local landscapes. Ultimately, the chapter illuminates the unnamed and unacknowledged racial logics, thereby expanding racialization beyond the racist versus not racist binary.

  PublisherDOI

• Encountering Race in Albania

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Encountering Race in Albania

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-05-13

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Encountering Race in Albania is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as West Ohueri shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that she terms the communist afterlife. Encountering Race in Albania , through the unexpected optic of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, offers significant insights into into broader understandings of race in a global context.

  PublisherDOI

• The Communist Afterlife

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses the racial imaginary within a broader context of imagination as it relates to Albania's communist afterlife. Imagination played a huge role in Enver Hoxha's regime, including the imagination of a different future and the reimagination of everyday life. Communism remains an active register in Tirana and in Albania and speaks to the reordering and restructuring of daily life in local and global contexts. Approaching the contemporary moment as a communist afterlife helps in understanding the lingering presence of Albania's past and analyze processes of race-making that are not always acknowledged nor immediately legible. These include ideas of backwardness, mentality, national prosperity and well-being, and what it means to become authentically European. The chapter also illustrates the ways that for many, Tirana has become both a dreamland and opportunity, a step closer to Europe for some, and yet also a place of deep disparity and desperation for others.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This concluding chapter demonstrates the need for new ways to examine Europe's racial arrangements and how people negotiate them. In this moment of intense migration and relocation in Europe, scholars must focus on the geographies of racial capitalism and whiteness that configure European inclusion and exclusion. Just as race operates, so does racelessness. In the post-World War II landscape, race is often publicly understood as only a problem of the Americas and the West, and racism is further framed only in terms of malevolence and animus stemmed by superficial notions of phenotype. All the while claims to racelessness continue to obscure and disguise whiteness and white supremacy, further entrenching everyday forms of socioracial inequality and violence. As such, there is a need to ask about the actions, doing, and mechanisms by which people are racializing and being racialized, by which race is imagined, is made, and operates. The chapter then considers the question of racism versus ignorance and assesses whether race can be unmade, undone, or dismantled.

  PublisherDOI

• Encountering Race in Albania

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2025-06-15

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. The book examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. The book argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as the book shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that the book terms the communist afterlife. The book, through the unexpected optic of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, offers significant insights into broader understandings of race in a global context.

  PublisherDOI

• From Pages to Praxis: How <i>Real Black</i> Shaped My Thinking on Ethnography and Race

  Current Anthropology · 2025-09-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julie A. Zuñiga

  The University of Texas at Austin

  11 shared

• Alexandra A. García

  The University of Texas at Austin

  7 shared

• Richard W. Moore

  Johns Hopkins University

  2 shared

• Kacey Hanson

  2 shared

• Ricardo P. Garay

  HiFiBiO Therapeutics (France)

  2 shared

• Monique Vasquez

  2 shared

• Mónica del Cisne Dávila Guzmán

  2 shared

• Dong Eun Jang

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  University of Texas at Austin

  2016