Mirjam de Bruijn is Professor of Citizenship and Identities in Africa at the African Studies Centre Leiden as of 1 September 2017. She is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character, with a preference for contemporary history and cultural studies. She focuses on the interrelationship between agency, marginality, mobility, communication and technology.  She is an Africanist with a focus on West and Central Africa. She has done extensive (qualitative) fieldwork in Cameroon, Chad and Mali. Her specific fields of interest are: nomadism, youth and children, social (in)security, poverty, marginality/social and economic exclusion, violence, human rights, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

In Mali she has worked in the Mopti area with the Fulbe (Peul) and in Menaka with the Tamacheck (Tuareg). In Chad she has 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 recent research focuses on urban youth and artists and their role in political movements.

From 2008 to 2013 Mirjam coordinated the research programme ‘Mobile Africa Revisited’, a comparative study of the interrelationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), agency, marginality and mobility patterns in Africa. In 2012 Mirjam was awarded a Vici grant (NWO) for the research programme ‘Connecting in times of duress: understanding communication and conflict in Middle Africa’s mobile margins’. Since 2013 she has developed the project ‘Voice4Thought’ (V4T), which is an example of valorization of research. Recently she received funding from the World Bank for a project on Mobile Money (2015-2016) in Africa and from UNICEF (2016-2018) to develop a project on child soldiers in the Central African Republic.

Mirjam de Bruijn was appointed Professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University on 15 June 2007. She gave her inaugural lecture on 5 September 2008.

Read the text of the inaugural lecture (Dutch)

Read the text of the inaugural lecture (English)

Read the text of the VICI project grant application ‘Connecting times of duress'

Read Mirjam de Bruijn's blog Counter Voices in Africa

Mayke Kaag is a professor in the anthropology of Islam in Africa and its diaspora at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and a senior researcher working on the political anthropology of Africa's global connections at the African Studies Centre Leiden. She did her PhD on land use and social change in Senegal (Vrije Universiteit 2001). Her current research focuses primarily on African transnational relations, including land issues, transnational Islamic charities, and engagements with the diaspora. She is the convenor of the collaborative research group ‘Africa in the World: Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections’. Key publications include: ‘The Global Land Grab. Beyond the Hype’ (co-edited with Annelies Zoomers, Zed Books 2014); ‘Islamic charities from the Arab world in Africa: intercultural encounters of humanitarianism and morality’(2016); ‘Linking-in through education?: exploring the educational question in Africa from the perspective of flows and (dis)connections’ (2018), ‘A plea for kaleidoscopic knowledge production’ (together with Miriam Ocadiz, 2019), and ‘Reflections on Trust and Trust Making in the Work of Islamic Charities from the Gulf region in Africa’ (together with Soumaya Sahla, 2020).

Mayke Kaag is Director of Studies at the ASCL and a member of its Executive Board.

Keywords: Africa in the world, political anthropology, anthropology of Islam, religion and development, migration, land issues.

(Photo credit: Kirsten van Santen).