I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Qualitative Methods in Social Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. I am currently working on the collaborative research project “Individual and collective memories of slavery and the slave trade: A contrastive comparison of different communities, generations and groupings in Ghana and Brazil” (2022-2025, funded by the German Research Foundation).

In the summer semester of 2022, I was a visiting professor (with a focus on gender and postcolonial studies) at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Before that, I worked on two other research projects in the field of migration, borders and collective memories (University of Göttingen, Germany; 2014-22, both funded by the German Research Foundation). In my doctoral thesis, I investigated memory practices and constructions of belonging in the Spanish border towns of Ceuta and Melilla.

My research interests include interpretive sociology, historical sociology, ethnography, biographical research, migration and border studies, gender and postcolonial studies and collective memories.

Doing global sociology for me means examining transregional and transcontinental interdependencies and inequalities, and analyzing them in their historical context and from a processual perspective. It also means recognizing that the social sciences are Eurocentric and have neglected other knowledge currents and traditions – and that this calls for an important change on various levels of scientific work (practical, epistemological, theoretical…). As I see it, the aim of global sociology is to build theories that are based on empirical research in, and comparison of, very different societal, historical and regional contexts. This requires collaboration and exchange between researchers from different parts of the world.