Visiting Research Fellowships 2020
Fazil Moradi
Associate Researcher
Fazil Moradi
Dr Fazil Moradi is a Research Associate at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Graduate Studies, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center – CUNY, New York, and a fellow at Law, Organization, Science and Technology (LOST) Research Network, Sci-Tech Asia Research Network, and Refugee Outreach & Research Network. Dr Moradi has been a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and taught at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Halle in Germany. In addition to his own research projects, he works together with medical science scholars on the long-term impacts of chemical warfare agents at Sahlgrenska Academy – University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
His current transdisciplinary inquiries involve the Colonial Epistemicide in Benin City in 1897; Modernity’s Infrastructure of Destruction and Memory; Algorithmic Modernity; and Decolonial Epistemology. At JIAS he also organizes a monthly Actuvirtual Symposium, bringing together scholars to participate in critical knowledge production and dissemination worldwide. Some of his publications appear in: British Medical Journal, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, Critical Studies, PLOS ONE, Genocide Studies International, CODESRIA, Routledge, Rutgers University Press, and Praesens Verlag. Dr Moradi has also commented on imperial politics, war, art, and genocidal and gender violence for various national and international news media, including openDemocracy, CultureProject, Bohusläningen, Flamman, Läkartidningen, and NRTTV.
Layla Brown-Vincent
Assistant Professor
Layla Brown-Vincent
Layla Brown-Vincent is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses on Blackness in Latin America, Black/Africana Feminisms, Global Left Social Movements, and the African Diaspora more broadly. Layla was trained as a Cultural Anthropologist but practices an interdisciplinary Pan-African Feminist scholarship and activism and also self-identifies as a “movement baby”. Her interest lies in producing scholarship committed to life, liberation and dignity for all peoples, most especially for formerly colonized/enslaved peoples of African descent. As a Visiting Research Fellow at Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study she is completing her first book manuscript, Return to the Source: The Dialectics of 21st Century Pan-African Liberation. In addition to completing her first book manuscript Layla will begin research for a new project provisionally titled, The Pandemic of Racial Capitalism: A Better World is Possible juxtaposing the neoliberal technologies of the disposability of life at play in the handling of COVID-19 in the US and Brazil alongside the socialist logic of the preservation of life at play in the cases of Venezuela and Cuba in order to explore the alternative world making that becomes possible through Pan-African thought, theory, and praxis.
Amaha Senu
Writer
Amaha Senu
Amaha Senu’s research interests include maritime security governance, illegalised and policed mobilities at sea, crimes and harms at sea, and the organisation of transnational crimes in the maritime domain. He is also interested in developing conceptual and methodological approaches to studying hidden, illicit, distant, mobile and dispersed activities in a transnational/globalised context, with a particular focus on maritime spaces. He works across International Relations, Criminology, Critical Security Studies, International Political Sociology and Global Political Economy. Before coming to JIAS, he was a Research Associate at the Seafarers International Research Centre at Cardiff University. He completed his PhD in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University as a SIRC-Nippon Foundation Fellow. As a Visiting Research Fellow at JIAS, he is working on his first monograph provisionally titled, Stowaways in Shipping: Crime, Insecurity and Global Governance. Currently, he is also developing two research projects focusing on drug trafficking across the maritime spaces off the coasts of Eastern and Western Africa.
Pier Paolo Frassinelli
Associate Professor
Pier Paolo Frassinelli
Pier Paolo Frassinelli is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Johannesburg. He has been working on a research project titled African Cinemas: Spaces, Audiences and Genres, which presents an ethnography and political economy of different spaces (cinemas, film festivals, websites, and other public spaces) where African films are screened, as well as an analysis of a selection of contemporary African films and of the genres and trends that they represent. The project maps the changes in contemporary African cinemas – new genres, directions and trends – brought about by digital production and distribution technologies, as well as by changes in the sociocultural context and in audience composition. He plans to use his time at JIAS to work on the first draft of a book originating from this project.