Sara Lagardien Abdullah holds a Bachelor of Social Science degree in African Studies and Sociology from the University of Cape Town and earned their Honours degree from the university’s Centre for African Studies. Sara is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (2021-2022).

A contributing author to We Rise For Our Land: Land Struggles and Repression in Southern Africa (Daraja Press, 2021), Sara’s research interests centre around food sovereignty, land, and restorative justice, ultimately drawing guidance from Indigenous biomes, people, and epistemes. Sara’s research 'thinking work' and everyday 'doing work' is encouraged by an attempt to restore the relations that we have been severed from and engages food and plants as mediums to invite us to cultivate more considered ways of inhabiting the world that embeds a multi-species dignity.

Situating storytelling as their praxis, Sara collaborates with Azania Rizing Productions as a writer, researcher, assistant producer, and photographer. They work on diverse projects that seek to offer articulations of the past, present, and future and, that centre Africa and the African diaspora, consequently affirming the continent’s legacy in world heritage.

Endowed by friends with the label of ‘Food Griot’, Sara works with their hands – charting gastrocartographies by building narrative through food processing. They hope to significantly contribute to South Africa and the broader continent’s emergent Food Studies arena through multimodal scholarship, whilst foregrounding land as a primary collaborator.

Through their time in a residence as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, Sara aims to pursue a Master’s in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape with a focus on Human-Plant Interfaces.