Michael Stasik is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel. He is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on diverse dimensions of urban life in West Africa, incl. mobility, infrastructure, imagination, intimacy, kinship and personhood.

Michael recently completed a research project on the changing practices and parameters of transnational urban migration within West Africa. This research considered how increasingly individualized mobility and livelihood strategies are refashioning social institutions of West African migration, esp. those based on kin and ethnic ties. Related research questions concerned the significance of distance, detachment and loneliness in constituting migrant experiences.

Building from the findings of this research, he is currently preparing a new project that shifts the perspective from younger generations moving to cities to those who stay put in their rural homesteads, later-age rural stayers, in particular. Set against massive demographic and economic changes – such as increasing life expectancy, shrinking family sizes and accelerating rural-urban mobility – this project will attend to how these transformations unfold across domains of kinship, later-age personhood and the intertwined ethics and expectations of care and mobility.

Michael’s doctoral research (U of Bayreuth) centred on a large bus station in Ghana’s capital Accra, which he considered with regard to the capacities and limits of informal infrastructural practices in a context of rapid transformations fuelled by global market forces and urban policies. His MPhil research (ASC Leiden) examined the meanings that youth in Freetown, Sierra Leone, invest in globally-distributed popular music, esp. in relation to the social negotiations of intimacy and reciprocity.

Before coming to Basel, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. He is co-editor of The Making of the African Road (2017), Bus Stations in Africa (2018) and Temporalities of Waiting in Africa (2020), and author of DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone (2012). He was a recipient of 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 a senior fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana. He is a member of the editorial team of the journal New Diversities.

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

• West Africa

Stasik, Michael. 2022. The migrant in a house of mirrors: some reflections on the reflexive turn in migration studies. Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa Blog.

Stasik, Michael, Valerie Hänsch and Daniel Mains. 2020. Temporalities of waiting in Africa. Critical African Studies 12(1): 1-9.

Stasik, Michael. 2019. Les bus ghanéens, entre attente, ruses et petits arrangements. Le Monde Afrique.

Stasik, Michael and Sidy Cissokho. 2018. Bus stations in Africa: introduction to special issue. Africa Today 65 (2): vii-xxiv.

Stasik, Michael and Gabriel Klaeger. 2018. Station waka-waka: the temporalities and temptations of (not) working in Ghanaian bus stations. Africa Today 65(2): 93-110.

Stasik, Michael 2018 The popular niche economy of a Ghanaian bus station: departure from informality. Africa Spectrum 53(1): 37-59.

Stasik, Michael. 2018. Diversity, anthropologically studied. MPI MMG Blog.

Stasik, Michael and Gabriel Klaeger. 2018. Reordering Ghana’s roadside spaces: hawking in times of infrastructural renewal. In: U. Engel, M. Boeckler and D. Müller-Mahn (eds) Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa, 153-172. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Stasik, Michael. 2017. Rhythm, resonance and kinaesthetic enskilment in a Ghanaian bus station. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82(3): 545-568.

Stasik, Michael. 2017. How to dance to Beethoven in Freetown: the social, sonic, and sensory organisation of sounds into music and noise. Anthropology Matters 17(2): 10-27.

Stasik, Michael. 2017. Alltagsspektakel am Straßenrand: Körpertechniken von Busausrufern in Accra, Ghana. In: P. Ivanov, M. Treiber & M. Verne (eds) Körper Technik Wissen. Kreativität und Aneignungsprozesse in Afrika - In den Spuren Kurt Becks, 405-417. Berlin: LIT.

Stasik, Michael. 2017. Roadside involution, or how many people do you need to run a lorry park. In: K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road, 24-57. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Beck, Kurt, Gabriel Klaeger and Michael Stasik. 2017. An introduction to the African road. In: K. Beck, G. Klaeger & M. Stasik (eds) The Making of the African Road, 1-23. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Stasik, Michael. 2017. Masse, Musik und der Kao-Kult: eine Konzertnacht in Freetown. Muße. Ein Magazin 3(1): 1-8.

Stasik, Michael. 2016. Real love versus real life: youth, music and utopia in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 86(2): 215-236.

Stasik, Michael. 2016. Contingent constellations: African urban complexity seen through the workings of a Ghanaian bus station. Social Dynamics:A Journal of African Studies 42(1): 122-142.

Thiel, Alena and Michael Stasik. 2016. Market men and station women: changing significations of gendered space in Accra, Ghana. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34(4): 459-478.

Stasik, Michael. 2015. Vernacular neoliberalism: how private entrepreneurship runs public transport in Ghana.Sociologus:Journal for Social Anthropology 65(2): 177-200.

Stasik, Michael. 2013. Freetown’s Jamaican reggae: further notes on audiences in Africa and on the social meanings of music. In: D. Omanga & M. Diderot (eds) The Making of Meaning in Africa: Discourse, Image and Text, 7-30. BIGSASworks No 4. Bayreuth: BIGSAS.

Stasik, Michael. 2013. In the hustle park: the social organization of disorder in a West African travel hub. Working Papers of the DFG Priority Programme 1448 (Nr. 1), Halle & Leipzig.

Stasik, Michael. 2012. DISCOnnections: Popular Music Audiences in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Leiden/Bamenda: ASC/Langaa.