Jasmijn Rana is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She has extensive experience in research on sport participation of Muslim women in the Netherlands and Morocco, and on diversity in heritage production. Her main areas of research focus on the everyday lived relations between actors/groups and the state and its interactions with race/ethnicity, gender and religion.

Jasmijn is one of the conveners of the EASA Network for the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity, and is an active participant in discussions on decolonizing anthropology, on which she published The Continuous Decolonization of Anthropology: the case of Muslims in Europe. She is also board member and editor in chief of the LOVA-Journal (Association for Feminist Anthropology).

In 2017, she graduated (magna cum laude) on her PhD thesis, titled 'Young Muslim Women in Kickboxing: Learning and Belonging', at Freie Universität Berlin. After publishing Ladies-Only! Empowerment and Comfort in Gender-Segregated Kickboxing in the Netherlands and Producing the National, Healthy Citizen: Participation in Ladies-Only Kickboxing Training, she is currently working on turning her PhD thesis into a book manuscript.

She is also developing a new project looking at how ‘culture’ in entangled in sports, by focusing on the embodiment of race/ethnicity, gender and religion in the practice of running, for which she recently received a seed-and breed grant of Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society.

Next to her academic activities, she has been working as a researcher and project manager in the cultural sector on projects on youth, diversity, urbanity and intangible heritage and arts. She co-published Moved by the tears of others: emotion networking in the heritage sphere, which resulted in the method ‘emotion-networking’ that is now being implemented in several museums.