Tracey Chipo Muradzikwa is a qualitative researcher and emerging Black woman scholar from Zimbabwe, focusing on gender, society, culture, and politics across Africa. She is currently collaborating with Dr Amanda Lea Robinson on an extensive research initiative examining traditional governance in Africa, with a particular focus on comparative case studies in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Drawing on multi-country fieldwork and qualitative research methods, the project examines how customary leadership structures, legitimacy, gender dynamics and succession disputes shape citizen engagement and state-customary relations.

She holds a PhD in Political Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Building on her doctoral thesis, her work examines how women chiefs’ governance strategies are configured in practice, with particular attention to debates and contestations surrounding succession and the legitimacy of female traditional leaders. She taught Feminist Theory and Politics and tutored Conflict, Stability and State Building in Post-colonial Africa and Black Consciousness and the Politics of Racism as a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Wits. Her academic trajectory has been supported by three Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa fellowships: the SSRC Proposal Grant (2021), the SSRC Dissertation Research Grant (2022), and the SSRC Dissertation Completion Grant (2023).

She also previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and an Early-Career Research Fellow under the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), hosted at the Centre of Excellence in Notions of Identity in Africa at the University of Nairobi before joining Ohio State University. During this period, she also taught courses in Gender and Development.

Alongside her scholarly research, she has developed an extensive consulting career as a Gender and Evaluation Expert. As Team Leader for African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), she led evaluations of major multi-country initiatives, including the One Planet Fellowship Programme in Kenya, Senegal, Malawi, and Ethiopia, as well as the Mid-Term Review of the Gender Responsive Agriculture Systems Policy (GRASP) Fellowship. She has also served as Lead Field Researcher for high-impact gender and social inclusion consultancies with international development partners such as UNICEF, Plan International, and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).