Kahina Meziant is a researcher, writer, and somatic practitioner whose work sits at the interface of critical geography, social policy, cultural practice, and embodied research. She holds a PhD in human geography from Northumbria University and was a Marilyn J. Gittell Postdoctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2022 to 2025. She now works independently from Europe, where she consults, writes, and continues her academic research.
Her work asks what institutions do to bodies, cities, and communities, and what people do in return. She has conducted commissioned research for the UK Home Office and Northumbria Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner on women’s safety in public parks; institutional ethnography and participatory research with organisations supporting migrants across northeast England; and evaluation and programme design across CUNY’s 25 colleges. Her fieldwork spans northeast England, New York, and the Mediterranean.
This method runs through her doctoral research, her Geographical Journal paper on migration and belonging, the Undiscipline workshop series at CUNY, and the December 2025 zine she edited from that work. It also shapes her applied practice: commissioned research and consulting for local authorities, NGOs, and cultural organisations; collaborative body mapping and participatory work with individuals and small groups, emerging from pilot work conducted in Tunis on how border bureaucracies are carried in the body; and one-to-one somatic support drawing on her yoga and somatic therapy training.
She has published in The Geographical Journal, Fennia, Collateral Journal, and in the edited collection Critical Geographies of Resistance; co-edits a 2026 Special Section of The Geographical Journal on what lies beyond citizenship as a frame; serves as poetry and art submissions editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly; and reviews for Antipode. She has presented at the AAG (USA), RGS-IBG (UK), ICCG (Mexico), and served as a jury member at the Beaux Arts de Bruxelles architecture final reviews.
Before academia, she trained and worked as a journalist in Paris, at France 24, BBC World, and The Good Life magazine. She was born in Algeria, grew up in Brussels, has lived and worked in Paris, Newcastle, New York, and now across Europe. She speaks French, English, and Kabyle, reads and writes in Dutch, and is a beginner in German and Arabic.
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For research and consulting enquiries, mention the project or sector in the subject line. For somatic practice enquiries, please read the Praxis page first.
Newsletter: moving day
Kahina Meziant 