I am trained in social and cultural anthropology and interdisciplinary social sciences. My current research projects are Urban Wood/s, Valued Difference, and Urban Alliances. I work on overlapping urban hierarchies based on ethnographic research in Brazil, Senegal, and Spain. Recently, I seek to understand the entanglements of the unequal social and material urban landscapes in Brazil. In the past decade, I have also worked with West African and Southern European migrants on how they (re)experience intersectional inequalities in Rio de Janeiro. Since my doctoral work, I have sharpened the notion of conviviality in my book Comparing Conviviality as a process of interaction, negotiation and translation from which forms of minimal and fragile sociality emerge. I have addressed situations of ethnic and religious plurality and multilingualism.

Currently, I am a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leuven. Before, I was a Principal Investigator of the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Merian International Centre for Advanced Studies (Mecila) at the University of São Paulo and the Brazilian Centre of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). I also held a FWO PEGASUS Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship (University of Leuven and the National Museum (PPGAS) of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and worked at the Centre of Excellence "Cultural Foundations of Social Integration" (University of Konstanz). During my doctoral training at the University of Oxford (2009-2013), I held a Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany, and was affiliated with the Oxford Diaspora Programme (International Migration Institute), the African Studies Centre and COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society).

Academic positions

2025-2026
Visiting Professor in Anthropology, University of Leuven

2020-2025
Principle Investigator at the Global South Studies Center and Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Cologne

2020-2025
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, University of Cologne, Germany

2017–2020 
Incoming Pegasus² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, University of Leuven, Belgium

2013–2017 
Postdoctoral Researcher and Member of the Steering Committee of the Doctoral Programme ‘Europe in the Globalised World’, University of Konstanz, Germany: Center of Excellence ‘Social Foundations of Cultural Integration’

2009–2013 
Doctoral Research Fellowship, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI MMG), Göttingen, Germany

Education

2015-2020 
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Museo Nacional, PPGAS, Brazil, Postdoctoral Researcher

2009–2013 
University of Oxford, UK, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology

2007–2008 
University of Oxford, UK, Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, MPhil (Distinction on Thesis) in Migration Studies
 

• Urban Studies
• Migration and Im/Mobility
• Transnationalism and Globalization
• Inequality and Social Stratification
• Conviviality, Cooperation and Conflict
• Race and Ethnicity
• Intersectionality and Queer
• Religion and Ethics

Urban alliances. The politics between old and new residents

Urban alliances asks how newcomers and longstanding residents in Brazilian cities, who face facets of the same post/colonial structures of exclusion, have differential access to privilege and citizenship, how they perceive each other, enter into dialogue, and labour to construct alliances at the fractured locuses they occupy. The project grounds in ethnographic fieldwork in cities like Rio de Janeiro (since 2014) and São Paulo (since 2019). The project conceptualises the politicization of newcomers alongside long-term residents in the 21st century as well as the potential and challenges for solidarity among marginalized populations, be they immigrant, Black, Left and/or Queer. All of them clearly face violent realities of intersectional exclusion grounded in the structures of coloniality of which racism, conservativism, and capitalist exploitation are part. Still, newcomers to Latin American cities defend ethical and political positions that may hold a strong potential for tension and conflict within local contexts of political struggle. Whiteness, negritude, gender/sexuality, and political orientation do not necessarily mean the same to Brazilian residents and African or European newcomers. The project will renew the understanding of global asymmetries and how they configure locally in contemporary Brazil. The refined understanding of local politics and societal resilience will be relevant not only to Latin American cities but also cities in other locations in the Global South and in the Global North.

(1) Valued difference. Recently arrived in Rio de Janeiro (2014-2020) 
Valued Difference traces social hierarchies, inequality, and urban change through the hi/stories of arrival of Senegalese (Heil 2020d, 2018) and Spanish (Heil 2020e) in Rio de Janeiro, a metropolitan space that envisioned a bright future before falling back into the current crisis. I enquire into how urban newcomers in Rio de Janeiro experience distinct social mobilities in(to) a locality which is characterized by multiple contradicting and interdependent social hierarchies that are historically shaped by race and class and, in recent years once more, by migration-related diversification. The project contributes to the emergence of a more nuanced, less concerted, and decentralized understanding of cities and social stratification. This conceptualization depends on how urban dwellers interpret, judge, and manage the situations through which they pass in everyday life and which take shape at the intersection of changing global relations and con/diverging social imaginaries (Heil 2020d, 2020e, 2019a, under review a, b). Questions of both situational and institutionalized hierarchisation take centre stage on multiple levels and in various arenas: origin, race, class, sex, gender, education, and legal status. Socio-economic precariousness (Heil 2017) intersects with problem-ridden constellations of black-black distinction (Heil 2020b, 2019c), postcolonial re/deconstructions of power hierarchies (Heil 2020e), and challenges of religious and gendered difference (Heil 2019a). Due to the interferences of unanticipated power configurations, knowledge regimes, public cultures, and sexual epistemologies, urban newcomers live their local incorporation in distinct spaces, shifting encounters, variously configured networks, and their respective temporalities. Different from long-term dwellers, newcomers draw upon conflicting translocal and diachronic reference frames. The project combines participant observation, informal, semi-structured interviews, and transect-walks with online ethnographic approaches to handle its vast geographic and temporal scope. This comparative study results in a ‘thick’, multi-sited, and multi-layered ethnographic account of valued difference, intersecting hierarchies, and trajectories of inequality.

Funding: 
Incoming Pegasus² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant 665501; Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) - Postdoctoral Fellowship, Centre of Excellence, University of Konstanz
Fieldwork:
Rio de Janeiro (2.5 years), Buenos Aires (1 month)
Relevant network: 
- Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
- Núcleo Interdisciplinar sobre Estudos Migratórios, UFRJ
- Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

(2) Stranded on transit in Djibouti. Female Ethiopian migrations (2017-2020)
Stranded in transit comparatively enquires into the migration trajectories and lived experiences of East and West African women who migrate to Europe, the Middle East, or Latin America. Many are stranded in transit and some have returned to their places of origin. Taking different places of origin in Ethiopia and Senegal into account, the project aims to comprehend the lived experiences of, and challenges faced by Ethiopian and Senegalese female migrants. The risks and challenges they face range from sex trafficking and exploitation, over detention and kidnapping for ransom, to social exclusion and accusations. This project, however, goes beyond a normative victimization narrative and pays particular attention to the women’s agency: the creative strategies they employ while negotiating their precarious and vulnerable position. The project studies the different mechanisms female migrants use to overcome challenges they face and their different pathways of incorporation. Furthermore, we enquire into the prospects of mobility and/or settlement of migrants in a transit country and the factors that affect their decisions to further migrate, settle, or return home. Benefiting from long-term contacts in the field sites, the project is based on qualitative ethnographic methods and life-story interviews.Comparing East and West African migration, transit, and return, we highlight the parallels and differences in the conditions and experiences of two very disparate gendered migration dynamics which sharpen the re/conceptualisation of gendered migration.

Funding: 
Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, Volkswagen Foundation
Fieldwork: 
Senegal (2 months); Brazil (2 month); Ethiopia (1 month)
Relevant network: 
- Dr Meron Zeleke Eresso (PI), Rift Valley University, Addis Ababa
- Center for Human Rights, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa
- Núcleo Interdisciplinar sobre Estudos Migratórios, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro
- Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Daka