Short presentation

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist who has been working on social mobility and status at the crossroads of (post-)slavery and migration studies, with a focus on francophone West Africa.

I studied and worked at Leiden University (Anthropology, African Studies Centre, Institute for History) and was associate professor at Nijmegen University (Anthropology and Development Studies). I obtained an EU co-fund scholarship for a year in French academia (CEAF, EHESS) and worked as a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (2015-2016), Copenhagen, Denmark.

In 2016 I co-edited the documentary movie ‘River Nomads’, which is about the transnational mobility of nomadic fishermen in West Africa (Nigeria, Niger, Mali). From 2017 I work at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (https://amis.ku.dk) part of the SAXO institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2018 I combined my lecturer position there with a postdoc in the project readingslavery.au.dk at Comparative Literature, Aarhus University. From 2018, I started working as an editorial board member of the recently established journal ‘Slaveries and Post-Slaveries’, based at CIRESC in France. In 2019 I was a senior Heinz Heinen fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), Germany. The fellowship was about testimonies for legal court cases, in contemporary ‘post-slavery’ societies of French West Africa. From early 2020, I started working as a Co-I on a collaborative GCRF/UKRI UK funded research project, about Protracted Displacements of People with slave status in Mali, West Africa, based at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, Copenhagen University.