Courses

My current focus in teaching is on research methodology, themes of political and social anthropology, and the anthropology of Africa. While working with academic institutions in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Cameroon, China, and Japan, I have taught the following courses (in German or English):

  • Inequality: Formen der Ungleichheit in Arbeits- und Migrationssituationen im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert
  • Race and Racialization
  • Theories from the Global South
  • "Moderne Klassiker": the oeuvre of Tim Ingold; Migrants and City Making (Caglar and Glick Schiller 2018); Ethnography between decoloniality and ontological turn (De la Cadena 2015)
  • Constructing the Field - Methods in Anthropology
  • Einführung in die Methoden der Ethnologie
  • Methoden der visuellen Anthropologie und Theaterethnologie
  • Flucht, Essen, Arbeitsmarkt - Ethnographie vor der Hausür
  • Flucht und Familie - Ethnographie vor der Hausür
  • Research, Action and Art – Ethnographie vor der Haustür
  • Islam und Sport - Ethnographie vor der Haustür
  • Migration and Gender
  • Human Trafficking: Academic and popular debates
  • Africa-Asia connections
  • South-South migration and global African entrepreneurship
  • Labour migration to the Gulf States
  • Migration und Entwicklung: Perspektiven aus Afrika
  • Ethnicity, indigeneity and minority rights
  • Ethnicity, resources, conflict
  • Ethnologie der Freundschaft
  • Hexerei, okkulte Ökonomien und Verschwörungstheorien
  • Regionalmodul West/Zentralafrika: Ethnographie Kameruns und Gabuns
  • Ethnologie Afrikas

Student supervision (BA, MA, PhD)

I have supervised students on Bachelor's, Master's and PhD level whose research centred on various subjects, including developmental projects of the Mission 21 in Cameroon, religious conversion and social integration in the US, livestock mobility in Ethiopia, Hip Hop in Cameroon, Muslim female migration in Cameroon, the international migration of Hausa in Cameroon, Cameroonian migration to the United Arab Emirates, return migration to Nigeria, the Eritrean diaspora in Switzerland, Whisky consumption as a multisensory experience, student protests and the decolonization of education in South Africa, etc.

While at the University of Cologne, I am supervising / have supervised the following PhD projects:

  • Saleh Seid Adem: Ethiopian Labor migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): multiple axes of differentiation and institutional embeddedness (start 2022)
  • Kim Schumann: “Can I call you?” Negotiating New Modes of Communication Between Cameroon and Abroad (start 2020)
  • Karim Zafer: Unaccompanied minor and youth refugees making a family (start 2017)
  • Lai Pik Chan: Migration in the time of change: Foreign English language teachers in Shenzhen (defended January 2021)
  • Séverin Kaji: Student Migration from Cameroon to China: Government Rhetoric and Student Experiences (defended 2020)
  • Moritz Heck: Plurinational Afrobolivianity - Afro-incigeonus articulations and interethnic relations in the Yungas of Bolivia (defended 2019)
  • Mira Menzfeld: 'What it means to die.' A participant observation with dying persons in Germany (defended 2016)
  • Katrin Schaumburg: "So where are we going to get our men? We must share". Bonyatsi als Ausdruck von agency schwarzer Frauen der südafrikanischen Mittelschicht (defended 2012)


    Documentary short by Michaela Pelican and Nikolaus Greil, 5:31 min.
    'Performing Ethnography': Cameroonian masked performance enacted by anthropology students of the University of Cologne as part of the course on methods of visual and theatre anthropology, 2013.
    Short description