Dr. Michael Stasik

Michael Stasik is a guest in 2024. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel. Michael is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on diverse dimensions of urban life in West Africa, incl. mobility, infrastructure, imagination, intimacy, kinship and personhood. From 2017 until 2022 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. He is co-editor of The Making of the African Road (2017), Bus Stations in Africa (2018) and Temporalities of Waiting in Africa (2020), and author of DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone (2012). He was a recipient of the Young Scholars’ Award of the African Studies Association in Germany, the Dissertation Award of the University of Bayreuth and ASC’s Africa Thesis Award, and a senior fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana. He is a member of the editorial team of the journal New Diversities.