Sophie Schasiepen obtained her PhD in history from the University of the Western Cape with a thesis entitled Southern African human remains as property: physical anthropology and the production of racial capital in Austria in 2021. She previously studied Fine Arts and Cultural Studies at the Braunschweig University of Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Since 2013, she has been co-editing Bildpunkt, the magazine of the IG Bildende Kunst Austria. In 2014, she was research assistant for the artistic research project Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom at Secession Vienna. In 2015/16, she was granted a Marietta Blau-scholarship from the Austrian agency for international mobility and from 2016 to 2018, a Junior Fellowship from the International Research Centre Cultural Studies Vienna. From 2018 to 2021, she was research assistant for the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Supranational Forum at the University of the Western Cape. Since 2021, she has been a member of the Action for Restitution to Africa project. She is interested in the intersections of negotiations around the return of ancestral remains and demands for global social and economic justice.