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Our June 2024 academic spotlight features H茅l猫ne Neveu Kringelbach, Associate Professor in African Anthropology at SELCS and 新香港六合彩开奖结果Anthropology.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am an Associate Professor in African Anthropology, with a shared appointment between SELCS and 新香港六合彩开奖结果Anthropology. I initially came to 新香港六合彩开奖结果in 2015 as a Lecturer in African Studies. The MA in African Studies was then housed in SELCS-CMII, but the programme hasn鈥檛 been running since 2019. Before joining UCL, I taught Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Oxford, where I also did my DPhil in Anthropology.
I grew up in France and in Cote d鈥橧voire, and my familial origins are in France and in Senegal 鈥� so I grew up in a very Francophone environment. In my 20s I lived in Denmark, where I first travelled as an exchange student. But then life happened, and I stayed quite a bit longer than planned鈥� It all sounds very cosmopolitan but in fact, for the first 10 years of my life I lived in a tiny studio with my mum, in what was then a working-class neighbourhood in Paris.
What are your research interests?
I have a life-long passion for music and dance, and my doctoral project was on dance and social change in Dakar, Senegal. I turned this research into a book which came out with Berghahn Books in 2013 (Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal). Since 2012 I have conducted fieldwork in Senegal, France and the UK on binational marriage and transnational family relationships. I am currently working on a monograph coming out of this research. The love (and heart break) stories and family histories I have collected are central to the book, but it is also a book about how colonial histories and migration regimes continue to shape relationships between Africa and Europe, sometimes at the most intimate level.
Tell us about some of your recent work on European issues
My current book project focuses in part on the impact of European migration policies on marriage and family relationships. This has a broader relevance since I argue, alongside other migration scholars, that the control of marriage migration has implications for the broader ways in which states attempt to control marriage and family life. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that has become increasingly politicised as family life becomes one of the 鈥榝rontiers鈥� in migration policy.
Through multi-sited fieldwork I have also developed an interest in the different constructions of race in different European contexts, hence my involvement in 新香港六合彩开奖结果European Institute's聽[Black Europe] initiative. Categories like black, white or mixed-race have very different histories in the UK, in France or in Francophone West Africa, for example, and as a result these identities are also inhabited in different ways. Discussions of race are often dominated by the American experience, but we need to pay more attention to other histories of racialization.
What does Europe mean to you and why are you interested in it?
I feel European as much as I feel West African, probably because I have lived in two West African countries and three European ones. I used to believe that Europe was about breaking down national, ethnic and racial boundaries while celebrating diversity in all its forms. Now I am not sure any more鈥� That was probably quite na茂ve. Nevertheless Brexit was a massive disappointment.