Urban lives and mobility - University of Birmingham

Urban space created infrastructures of contestation and movement, setting in motion journeys of becoming, community, relationship, and social mobility. People migrate to urban spaces in pursuit of social mobility. Cities are built and destroyed, imagined, claimed, and resisted.

DASA’s research explores how subjectivities, political and life-making projects, and alternative visions of society emerge through the multiple entanglements of everyday economies, urban identities, and transformations of the built environment, and journeys of mobility and migration. In this endeavour, DASA’s research goes beyond a process of documentation, becoming also an active engagement in the pursuit of more just futures and an exploration in how life can be otherwise.

Researchers

Academic staff

Leslie Fesenmyer: transnational migration, kinship, belonging, and religion (especially Pentecostalism)
Juliet Gilbert: youth studies, religion, insecure livelihoods, and aspects of popular culture (fashion, beauty pageants, mobile phones)
Fuad Musallam: The Middle East; migrant labour; urban life; activism and social movements; political subjectivity/imagination; affect and emotion; temporality and futurity.
Marco Di Nunzio: lived experiences of marginality and dispossession, the politics of city-building, architecture and professional ethics, authoritarianism, activism, work, the street economy and everyday forms of resistance.
Anthony Pickles: Economic anthropology, Oceania, gambling, political anthropology, anthropology of the future, anthropology of finance, anthropology of elites
Nathalie Raunet: belonging, citizenship, authoritarianism, transnationalism and borders

Doctoral researchers

Ellis Richards - The impact Black Majority Churches have on Black communities in Birmingham
Galatea Scotti - Life After Deportation: Masculinity and Temporality in Deported Migrants' Experiences of Forced Return to Ghana

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD related to Urban Lives and Mobility, please contact a member of staff above.

Projects

Previous projects

Publications

Monographs and other books

Nathalie Raunet (forthcoming 2026). Political Belonging in the Ghana-Togo Borderlands: Citizenship and the Vote at the Margins of the State, Cambridge University Press, African Studies Series.
Marco Di Nunzio 2026. Unjust Developments: Building Inequalities in Ethiopia’s Capital, Fordham University Press.
Leslie Fesenmyer, 2023. Relative Distance: Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press).
Pickles, A.J., 2019. Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town, Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) Studies in Pacific Anthropology Series Volume 10, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Di Nunzio, M. 2019 ‘The Act of Living. Street life, Marginality and Development in urban Ethiopia’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Articles and book chapters

Di Nunzio, M. 2023 “Heresies and provocation: for a politics of urban justice”. Allegra Lab. November 2023.
Musallam, F. 2020. ‘The Dissensual Everyday: Between Daily Life and Transgressive Acts in Beirut, Lebanon’, City & Society 32, no. 3.
Musallam, Fuad. 2020. ‘Feeling Political Times: Notes from Downtown Beirut during the Uprising’. Interventions (Contemporary Theatre Review) 29 (4).
Fesenmyer, L. 2019 Bringing the Kingdom to the city: Mission as place-making practice among Kenyan Pentecostals in London. Special issue of City and Society. 31(1): 35-54.
Gilbert, J 2019, 'Mobile identities: photography, smartphones and aspirations in urban Nigeria', Africa, vol. 89, no. 2, pp. 246.
Di Nunzio, M. 2019. Hustling at "the end of history". Development and inequality in inner city Addis. Ethiopia Insight, November 14, 2019.
Di Nunzio, M. 2019. ‘Not my job: Architecture, Responsibility and Inequalities in an African metropolis’. Anthropological Quarterly. 92 (2): 375 - 402
Di Nunzio, M. 2018. ‘Anthropology of Infrastructure’. Governing Infrastructure Interfaces. LSE Cities. Research Note 01.
Di Nunzio, M. 2018. ‘Unequal Measures: the right to the city in Lagos and Addis Ababa’, Architectural Review, 1452: 58-61
Johnson, J. 2017. ‘After the mines: the changing social and economic landscape of Malawi-South Africa migration’ Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) 44 (152): 237-51.
Di Nunzio, M. 2017. ‘Marginality as a Politics of Limited Entitlements. Street life and the Dilemma of Inclusion in Urban Ethiopia, American Ethnologist, 44 (1): 91 - 103
Di Nunzio, M. 2015. ‘Back to the Present: Economic Growth, Youth and Development’, Democracy in Africa, 29 January, 2015
Di Nunzio, M. 2015. ‘Embracing Uncertainty. Young people on the move in Addis Ababa’s inner city’, in Cooper L., Pratten D. (eds) Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 149 – 172
Di Nunzio, M. 2014. ‘Do Not Cross the Red line: the 2010 General Election, Dissent and Political Mobilisation in Urban Ethiopia’, African Affairs 113 (452): 409 – 430
Di Nunzio, M. 2014. ‘Thugs, Spies and Vigilantes: Community policing and street politics in inner city Addis Ababa’, Africa 84 (3): 444 - 465
Pickles, A.J., 2014. ‘Gambling Futures: Playing the Imminent in Highland Papua New Guinea', in Will Rollason (ed.) Pacific Futures: Projects, Politics and Interests, New York: Berghahn, 96-113.
Pickles, A.J., 2013. ‘'One-Man One-Man': How Slot-Machines facilitate Papua New Guineans' Shifting Relations to Each Other’, in Rebecca Cassidy, Claire Loussouarn and Andrea Pisac (eds.) Qualitative Research in Gambling: Exploring the Production and Consumption of Risk, Oxford: Routledge, 171–184.
Di Nunzio, M. 2012. ‘“We are good at surviving”. Street hustling in Addis Ababa’s inner city’, Urban Forum 23(4): 433 - 447

Media

Di Nunzio M. 2025. “The Stakes Could Not Be Higher : Home and the Regeneration of Ladywood”. Centre for the New Midlands.
Di Nunzio M. 2024. “When history is at risk of repeating itself: regeneration and demolition in Ladywood”. Centre for Urban WellBeing blog.
Di Nunzio, M. 2023. “Architects’ responsibility is not just about ethics. It should be about justice”. Perspectives Blog. 23 August, 2023.
Di Nunzio M. “Seeing the city like”. Radio Interview. Kebet iska Ketema, Radio Shegher FM 102.1. 2 May, 2023.
Di Nunzio Marco 2022. “Evictions for development: dispossession and the politics of unequal entitlements in inner-city Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), 2010–2018”, Political Geography 98: 102671
Di Nunzio Marco “Interview: The Act of Living”. Capital Ethiopia, February 16, 2020, pp.20 – 21
Di Nunzio Marco Radio Interview on “The Act of Living”. Hypnotized Show, 105.3 Afro FM, 14 February, 2020
Talk by Marco Di Nunzio on The Act of Living at the Glasgow Anthropology Network – University of Glasgow - June 5, 2020
Talk by Marco Di Nunzio on The Act of Living at the African Studies Centre – University of Oxford - May 2, 2019
Di Nunzio Marco 2019. Addis Ababa’s street hustlers helped build the city – now they’re being pushed out. The Conversation, July 8, 2019
Di Nunzio Marco 2018. ‘Requiem for Arat Kilo’, in Burdett Ricky, Rode Philipp, Griffiths Peter (eds) Developing Urban Futures. Urban Age. LSE Cities: 62

Events

2025 Critical Junctions: Anthropology on the Move, the Association of Social Anthropologists Conference held at the University of Birmingham.
2024 Connecting Struggles: Place, Environment, and Communities During Birmingham’s Bankruptcy. A Workshop aided by Marco Di Nunzio
2024 Towards Understanding Contemporary African Diasporas: Bringing Race and Decolonisation In. The 2023-24 DASA Fage Lecture by Dominic Pasura, University of Glasgow
Di Nunzio M. 2023. “Conspiracies to Build: Responsibility and city building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia”. PSIR Public Lecture Series. Addis Ababa University. May 4, 2023
Di Nunzio M. 2023. "Epistemics of cluelessness and the politics of urban expertise”. HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa Special Lecture. University of Cape Town (Cape Town, 12 May 2023)
Di Nunzio M. 2023. “Knowing a city”. Public Lecture. EiABC Chair of Basic Architecture and Design. Addis Ababa University. 3 May, 2023
Di Nunzio M. 2019 Propositions of the (non)urban: dancing the future away. The 2018-19 DASA Fage Lecture by Abdoumaliq Simone, University of Sheffield
Di Nunzio M. 2019 ‘Law, Custom and Urban Property in Africa’, a Cadbury Workshop held at DASA

Ethnographic documentaries and exhibitions

Di Nunzio M. Exhibition. Arada // Street Smart. Gallery Centrala Space. 7 – 18 May.
Di Nunzio M. Documentary. A day in Arada (’17). [Awarded best documentary at Cotswold International Film Festival and Paddy Town Film Festival, finalist at Rome Prisma Awards, semi-finalist at the Small Axe – Radical Short Films, honorable mention at AIMA Film Festival in Athens. Official selection at Iconic Images Film Festival, Anatolia International Film Festival, Ramsgate International Film Festival, Kutaisi International Short Film Festival]