Johara Bellali is a doctoral researcher with Transtechnology Research in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth.

Working at the intersection of birth, consciousness and socio-ecological transformation, her doctoral research investigates the lived experience of physiological childbirth. Using micro-phenomenology, she attends to the felt, moment-to-moment texture of birthing consciousness and of birth as a liminal state of transformation, asking what this human regenerative process can teach us about how transformation can be accompanied at wider scales (midwifing transformation). Grounded in a relational onto-epistemology drawn from Black feminism, enactivism, posthumanism  and midwifery studies, her work reframes childbirth from a reproductive event to a regenerative phenomenon, and asks what our cultural relationship to birth reveals about our relationship to Earth's life-supporting systems.

This enquiry follows two decades of practice in global environmental governance and humanitarian response. Working with UN agencies, she supported the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Conventions, coordinated climate vulnerability and adaptation assessments across Africa, Asia and Latin America, advised national and municipal governments on climate action, and led teams through humanitarian responses to the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Horn of Africa famine. Over the past six years she has worked as an evaluator of international security, climate and gender programmes and as a caseworker and researcher with a Black feminist charity on women rights and migration.

Alongside her doctoral research she has held two research fellowships in Arts and Health at the University of Plymouth, co-authoring work on extended reality and emotional wellbeing for autistic people, published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, and on digital health literacy with the Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust.

Johara is a certified doula and the author of A Scenography of Inscriptions and Intangibles in the Birthing Room (2022), Tending the Margins: Learnings from the Birthing Body as a Membrane (2024). A Moroccan-German-Luxembourg national, Johara works across languages and disciplines. Centred on care, human rights and ecosystems, her transdisciplinary practice explores the space in between, bringing diverse and uncommon actors together to explore adjacent solutions.