Prof. Dr. Heike Drotbohm

I am a professor of cultural and social anthropology. For many years I have been working on different dimensions of mobility and migration, concentrating on societies in the transatlantic region - especially the Caribbean, the Upper Guinea Coast and Brazil. After studying in Münster and Marburg, I received my doctorate in Marburg with a thesis on the spiritual practices of Haitian migrants in Montréal, Canada. I spent my post-doc phase in Freiburg (Breisgau), where I habilitated with a research on transnational Cape Verdean family relations. The focus here was to what extent normative expectations of the success of family-based migration ideals as well as migration-specific performances of intimate relationships contribute to the formation - maintenance or dissolution - of cross-border family constellations.

In my most recent research project, carried out in the Brazilian metropolis of São Paulo, I examine how newly arrived migrants perceive the city's landscape of care, what kinds of social ties they create therein, what forms of support they receive in humanitarian and in pro-migrant contact zones of care and how this affects their individual subject positions.

Heike Drotbohm holds a visiting professorship at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in October 2024. In addition to teaching students on "marcadores sociais da diferença" (engl: social markers of difference”) she will give a lecture on her current research on pro-migrant activism in São Paulo and contribute to the general intellectual exchange within the department of Anthropology.

Nanneke Winters, Heike Drotbohm, and Yaatsil Guevara González (eds): (Un)Settling Place. Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move

On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde. In:
Laura Huttunen & Gerhild Perl (eds.): An Anthropology of Disappearances: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing. Oxford, New York:
Berghahn: 2023.

Drotbohm, Heike: “On the Slow Silencing of Absences: Sensing Social Disappearances in Cape Verde” (pp. 52 – 72).

Migration and Im/Mobility in the Global South during a Global Pandemic (DFG network)
together with Antje Missbach, Universität Bielefeld.

The Management of Loss: Politics of Life and Death in Minas Gerais (Brazil)
Whereas ‘crises,’ such as the outbreak of an epi- or pandemic and the ‘catastrophic’ collapse of infrastructures, are usually analyzed separately in anthropology, this project suggests a shift of attention. Instead, it scrutinizes the interrelated ways in which multiple crises shape expectations towards and understandings of governance and (state) care practices, and the consequences these bear for the people affected, by focusing on a specifically local, postcolonial and post-dictatorial context.