Team > Paolo Gaibazzi, PD Dr.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Anthropology

News

• July 2020 - October 2022: Heisenberg Position on "AfroEuropean Frontiers," Chair for Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth
  

Scientific Career

• Feb. 2012 - Dec. 2019: Senior Researcher and Vice-Coordinator (2015-19) of Research Unit: “Progress: Ideas, Agents, Symbols”, ZMO–Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
• Mar. - July 2019: Guest Lecturer, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität, Berlin
• July 2017: Habilitation for Professorship in Social and Cultural Anthropology granted by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (Abilitazione Nazionale Scientifica Settore Concorsuale 11/A5, Seconda Fascia)
• May 2017: Visiting Fellow, Academy of Advanced African Studies, University of Bayreuth
• Oct. 2016 – Mar. 2017: Guest Lecturer, Humboldt University, Institute for Asian and African Studies (IAAW), Berlin
• 2006 – 2016: Research Associate, Ethnological Mission in Benin and West Africa (MEBAO) (PI: A. Bellagamba), University of Milan-Bicocca. Funder: Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Clusters: “Historical Legacy and Current Practices of Mobility”; “Memories of Slavery”.
• 2013 – 2016: Research Associate, PRIN Project “State, Plurality, Change in Africa” (PI: P. Valsecchi), University of Pavia. Funder: Italian Ministry for Education and Research.
• Aug. - Sept. 2016: Visiting Professor of Anthropology, University Agostinho Neto, Faculty of Social Sciences, Angola
• Oct. 2010 – Jan. 2012: Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and Philology, University of Latvia, Riga
• Aug. – Sept. 2011: African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) Visiting Researcher, Centre for African Studies, ISCTE, Lisbon. Supported by an Exchange Visit Grant from the European Science Foundation,
• Nov. 2005 – May 2010: PhD in Anthropology of the Contemporary World, University of Milan-Bicocca. Dissertation: “Soninke Young Men, Migration and the Dynamics of Staying Behind, The Gambia”, Supervisor: Prof. Alice Bellagamba
• Sept. 2009 – Apr. 2010: Programme Coordinator, Postgraduate Specialisation Degree Anthropology of Migration, University of Milano-Bicocca.
• Sept. 2004 – Sept. 2005: MSc in Visual Anthropology, University of Oxford
• Oct. 1999 – July 2002: BA in Social Anthropology (First Class Honours), University of Kent at Canterbury

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Anthropology

Priorities

I am interested in the social possibilities emerging from movement and stasis. As part of my current project on AfroEuropean Frontiers – which is supported by Heisenberg-Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) – I explore expand and complement current work on the externalization of migration management in the Euro-African zone with a South-South, non-Eurocentric perspective resulting from previous research on African migration.

My monograph Bush Bound: young men and rural permanence in migrant West Africa  explores how young men willy-nilly stay put in a Gambian village of heightened but stalled male emigration, and bear the onus of regenerating agrarian futures. Questions of social reproduction and change successively brought me to Angola, to investigate how a long-standing West African Muslim trading diaspora adapts to globalizing markets and migration governance.

Woven into the threads of my research is the analysis of post-slavery relations in West Africa and in the West African diaspora. With reference to the highly transnational Soninke-speaking milieu, my work documents the persisting inequalities, the paths of emancipation and the movements of contestation unfolding from the official end of internal slavery in West Africa.

Finally, fieldwork on precarious livelihoods in the Gambia and on the boom-and-bust Angolan economy has prompted me to tackle questions of contingency and potentiality. My work seeks to unravel the ethical, existential and cosmological depths of living a life marked by uncertainty and yet pregnant with possibility. Among others, this has resulted in a collective attempt to breathe new life into classic debates on fate, fortune and work in Africa. 

Research Interests

Migration, Im/mobility and Border Regimes; Post-Slavery, Rural Youth; Trade and Economic Ethic; Contingency and Potentiality; Fate and Fortune in Islam.

Current Projects

AfroEuropean Frontiers

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Anthropology

Publications

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Anthropology

Paolo Gaibazzi, PD Dr.
Heisenberg Position at the Chair for Social Anthropology

E-mail: paolo.gaibazzi@uni-bayreuth.de
Homepage: Anthropology | Universität Bayreuth