Mirjam de Bruijn

Mirjam de Bruijn was appointed Professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of West and Central Africa at Leiden University’s Faculty of Arts as of 15 June 2007. She gave her inaugural address entitled ‘De telefoon heeft benen gekregen; Mobiele communicatie en sociale veranderingen in de marges van Afrika’ on 5 September 2008. In August 2010 she was also appointed as an honorary fellow of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Mirjam de Bruijn is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character. She has done fieldwork in Cameroon, Chad and Mali and an important theme throughout is how people manage risk (drought, war, etc.) in both rural and urban areas. She focuses on the interrelationship between agency, marginality and mobility. Her specific fields of interest are: nomadism, youth and children, social (in)security, poverty, marginality/social and economic exclusion, violence, slavery, and human rights.

In Mali she worked in the Mopti area with the Fulbe (Peul) and in Menaka with the Tamacheck (Tuareg), and while in Chad she worked in N'Djamena (the capital) and in Central Chad with Hadjerai and Arab groups. In Cameroon she works in the Grassfields and the north. Her programme ‘Mobile Africa Revisited’, which started in 2008, is a comparative study of the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and ICT's interrelationship with agency, marginality and mobility patterns in Central and West Africa.

In January 2012, Mirjam de Bruijn was awarded a VICI grant for her proposal entitled ‘Connecting in Times of Duress: Understanding Communication and Conflict in Middle Africa’s Mobile Margins’. This research programme seeks to understand the dynamics in the relationship between social media, mobile telephony and the social fabric under duress in Africa’s mobile margins and combines studies on mobility/migration, conflict and communication in an attempt to uncover the new dynamics that were so evident in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011.