Michael Stasik is a lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel. His research and teaching focus on migration, mobility, infrastructure, kinship, affect and imagination, with a regional specialization in West Africa.

In recent years, Michael’s research has explored the urban-bound mobility of younger generations of West African migrants, and how increasingly individualized movement and livelihoods refashion familial and affective attachments. His current project shifts to rural stayers, especially older adults, examining how intensifying outmigration impacts kinship relationship across generations, ushering in new forms of and struggles over belonging, social reproduction and care. Related research questions concern the significance of absence, detachment and loneliness in the lives of both migrants and those who stay put.

Michael is the author of Bus Station Hustle: Transport Work in Urban Ghana (Cambridge UP, 2024), which examines the capacities and limits of infrastructural practices amidrapid transformations driven by global market forces and urban policies. His first book, DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone (ASC/Langaa, 2012), explores how Sierra Leonean youth engage with globally-distributed popular music, particularly in relation to social negotiations of intimacy and reciprocity.

Michael has co-edited the journal special issues Temporalities of Waiting in Africa (Critical African Studies, 2020) and Bus Stations in Africa (Africa Today, 2018), as well as the volume The Making of the African Road  (Brill, 2017). His work has also been published in journals such as Africa, Ethnos, JRAI and Social Dynamics. He currently serves as editor of the Basel Anthropology Papers and is a member of the editorial team of New Diversities.

Before joining Basel, Michael was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. He has received the Young Scholars’ Award of the African Studies Association in Germany, the Dissertation Award of the University of Bayreuth and ASC’s Africa Thesis Award, and was a senior fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.

• Mobility and migration
• Affect, intimacy and imagination
• Infrastructure and work
• Time and temporality

• West Africa