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    Continuously shaping horizontal global collaboration

    Brazil Conviviality Inequality Mecila
    It is a pleasure to announce that over the coming years I will be able to work together with the colleagues from the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America - Mecila - to inquire into the entanglements of inequality and conviviality in Latin American societies.

    The Centre is a collaboration between seven research institutions in four countries and two continents
    • Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales Research (Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences, IdIHCS)
    • El Colegio de México (The College of Mexico, COLMEX)
    • Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (Brazilian Centre of Analysis and Planning, CEBRAP)
    • Universidade de São Paulo (University of São Paulo, USP)
    • Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Ibero-American Institute, IAI)
    • Freie Universität Berlin (Free University Berlin, FU Berlin), and
    • Universität zu Köln (University of Cologne, UzK)
    The last will be my academic home from where I will work with colleagues on the [hi]stories in which forms of living together with difference are entangled diachronically. It allows me to draw my expertise from my previous projects in Senegal, Spain, and Brazil together.
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    Aproximar-se às diferenças urbanas valorizadas a partir do imagético

    Brazil Events Valued Difference
    A potencialidade dos registros visuais na etnografia com residentes urbanxs recém-chegadxs
    Invited by the Núcleo de Antropologia Visual (NAVISUAL) of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul I'll be presenting some of the visual cues that my interlocutors in Rio de Janeiro use to tell their stories in Rio de Janeiro and my own visual registers that developed over hearing their characterizations of the city and its inhabitants. I'm very much looking forward to the debate!

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    Deromanticising integration. On the importance of convivial disintegration

    Conviviality Integration Migration Politics Publications
    in Migration Studies [Open Access]
    with Fran Meissner

    Abstract
    In light of current experiences with migration-driven diversification, is it still conducive to think about the effects of international migration by advocating for immigrant integration? This article argues that there are key problems with European uses of immigrant integration logics that cannot be resolved through redefinitions or reappropriations of the term. Even highly refined notions of immigrant integration misconstrue the role and relevance of differences in diversity dynamics. Immigrant integration further risks concealing and perpetuating power dynamics and (colonial) hierarchies. These continue to shape the social relevance of differences. Analytically thinking about superdiversity directs us to paying more attention to disintegration, a notion that cannot be reduced and measured by way of individual or group performance. To be able to usefully engage with disintegration, we argue that it needs to be divorced from ideas about social fragmentation and social collapse. To do this, we draw on recent developments in the literature on conviviality to emphasise the relational practices, power asymmetries, and materialities that enter into negotiations of difference. Convivial disintegration aptly addresses continuously reconfiguring and uncertain social environments. Our article thus provides a deromanticised and enabling provocation for easing integration anxieties.
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    Comparing Conviviality - in print

    Comparing Conviviality Conviviality Migration Politics Publications Senegal Spain
    In a world where difference is often seen as a threat or challenge, Comparing Conviviality explores how people actually live in diverse societies. Based on a long-term ethnography of West Africans in both Senegal and Spain, the book proposes that conviviality is a commitment to difference, across ethnicities, languages, religions, and practices.
    Heil brings together longstanding histories, political projects, and everyday practices of living with difference. With a focus on neighbourhood life in Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain - two equally complex regions - Comparing Conviviality depicts how Senegalese people skillfully negotiate and translate the intricacies of difference and power. In these lived African and European worlds, conviviality is ever temporary and changing. 
    This book offers a textured, realist, yet hopeful understanding of difference, social change, power, and respect. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of African, migration, and diversity studies across anthropology, sociology, geography, political sciences, and law.
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    Conviviality as diasporic knowledge

    Conviviality Publications Senegal Spain
    in African Diaspora 11 (1-2): 53-70

    Abstract
    ​Based on my time with im/mobile West Africans in Senegal and Spain since 2007, I propose conviviality to conceptualise the complexity of my interlocutors’ local and diasporic tactics and views of living with difference. Simple everyday encounters such as greeting and dwelling in urban spaces serve to disentangle their various levels of reflection, habitual expectations and tactical action. They had local to global reference frameworks at their disposal. Not pretending to represent their knowledge, I discuss the inspirations I received from trying to understand what they shared with me non/verbally regarding living with difference. To start from this decentred set of premises challenges established Western/Northern politics of living with difference. Through conviviality, I show a distinct way of engaging multiple and overlapping ways of differentiating and homogenising practices and raise awareness for the importance and feasibility of minimal socialities in diasporic configurations, transnational migrations and the respective local urban contexts.

    link
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    Conviviality on the brink

    Brazil Publications Senegal
    in Mecila Working Paper 14 (full text)

    Abstract
    ​Current academic usages of the notion of conviviality often carry a normative connotation in which it is opposed to tension and conflict. Instead, I propose to use conviviality as an analytical term; This everyday living together is characterized by tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies that complicate abstract theorization and the use of clearly defined concepts whose role is, as Stuart Hall once suggested, to give us a good night’s rest by feigning a stability we long for. If conviviality is, as I suggest, understood as a notion that embraces the inconsistencies, multiplicities, and complexities of new urban ways, I inquire into the emerging relationalities between recently-arrived Senegalese and their social context in Rio de Janeiro under the impact of multiple hierarchical orders, including race, origin, education, and class.