Christine ChalifouxAssistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology/Africana Studies
Christine Chalifoux is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at
Franklin & Marshall College. She has conducted long term fieldwork in Kampala and
across Uganda, and her book manuscript, The Contentious City, explores how Uganda's distinct histories affect the ways in which people relate
to one another. With ethnic difference bearing the weight of colonial and postcolonial
stereotypes, her work shows how migrant workers nonetheless forge bonds of kinship
with one another after moving to the capital city in search of wage labor. All of
her work grapples with the dialectical relationship between intimacy and resentment,
and her most recently published work interrogates political aesthetics, economic precarity, and memories of violence.
Her next project, in Tema, Ghana, foregrounds the experiences of children born of
Korean fathers and Ghanaian mothers throughout the 1980s and 1990s and how they come
to inhabit their racial and ethnic identities. With the rise of Chinese influence
on the African continent and the COVID pandemic, how have ideas of being East Asian
shifted? Her work has been published in AFRICA, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, and Sapiens, among other venues, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and multiple
centers from the University of Michigan.