Amanda Haas Abd el Halim (she/they) is a researcher and artist-designer in Urban Studies at the University of Basel. Amanda’s study examines Ecologies of Care as infrastructural and everyday responses to intersecting local and global crises. They focuse on a range of initiatives that seek to preserve the commons and safeguard neglected urban green spaces by cultivating networked care. She explores how residents maintain and envision their immediate environments and futurability in Greater Cairo, Africa’s largest metropolitan area. This research on Ecologies of Care is supported by the University’s G3S start-up grant in 2026.

Drawing on critical urban studies, feminist and postcolonial theory, and social anthropology, this investigation uses long-term visual and embodied ethnography to trace how care unfolds in everyday urban life. Ecologies of care foregrounds collective and interspecies cooperation. It follows the notion of radicalcare, originating with feminist Audre Lorde and other Black thinkers, and contrasts individualized, standardized neoliberal self-care with interdependent, temporal and creative interventions. Empirically, the project contributes to debates on more-than-human ecologies, urban precarity, the right to the city, and care as a spatial and ethical reimagining of shared urban life amid increasingly heightened tensions.

Amanda holds a BA in Visual Communication from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and an MA in Critical Urbanisms from the University of Basel 2026. Before beginning their academic career, Amanda worked as a designer in cultural and social contexts, developing visual identities and designing books. 

www.amandahaas.ch 

• Ecologies of Care 
• More-than-human and Interspecies Care 
• Embodied Methodologies 
• Intersectional Networked Feminisms
• Visual Ethnography

• Egypt
• Switzerland