
Professor Dr Mirjam de Bruijn. IASH European Fellow, February to March 2020
Mirjam de Bruijn is Professor in ‘Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa’ at Leiden University and the African studies Centre Leiden (ASCL). Her specific fields of interest are: mobility, youth, social (in)security, marginality/exclusion, human rights, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In 2016 she founded the organisation Voice4thought (www.Voice4Thought.org). Mirjam teaches ‘innovative methods’ and ‘Media and Power’ in the programmes African Studies and History of Leiden University.
During her stay at Edinburgh she will work on publications about the relationship between duress, connectivity and networks from West and Central Africa. Special attention will be given to the networks of artists and to the networks of nomadic pastoralists. This is based on fieldwork and research coordination of the project Connecting-in-times-of-duress.nl; and Nomads' movements in the Sahel (wwwnomadesahel.org). Next to this research work she is interested in developing further teaching programmes in which the qualitative digital is more central both as data gathering and in analysis. Digital humanities focuses a lot on quantitative methods (computational) while we need to develop further the qualitative digital methods.
Among her latest publications:
De Bruijn, Mirjam & Jonna Both (2018 fc.) Introduction: Realities of Duress in Africa: Understanding Experiences and Trajectories in Situations of Enduring Hardship