Michael Stasik is an anthropologist working at the intersection of urban cultures, economies and mobilities in West Africa. He received his PhD in anthropology (2017) from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies and an MPhil in African studies (2010) from the African Studies Centre Leiden. His PhD dissertation analyses the socio-cultural and economic significance of a major bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra. His MA thesis explores the practices and meanings that youth in Freetown, Sierra Leone, invest in popular music, especially in relation to love, fantasy and the sexual economy. From 2011 to 2017 he has worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth.

Michael’s project at the MPI-MMG examines the lifeworlds of francophone West African migrants in urban Ghana. Its key question is how francophone migrants master, or fail to master, the exigencies of immigrant life in the diverse and largely non-French speaking social environments of Ghanaian cities. Attending in particular to the relationship between urbanism, diversity and solitude, this research aims at building new theoretical approaches with the capacity to understand how changing forms of mobility and association shape sociality as well as West African urban life more generally.