Faculty Research Fellow
Ato Kwamena Onoma’s current work examines mobility, identity, belonging, and inter-communal relations through the prisms of epidemics and phobia, and the faith-based segregation of interment spaces. He is the author of two books with Cambridge University Press: The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa (2009) and Anti-Refugee Violence and African Politics (2013). He has previously taught at Yale University and worked with CODESRIA. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Ghana and a doctorate in Political Science from Northwestern University.
Fellowship Project: Mobility, Faith, and Segregated Cemeteryscapes
Why do some towns in Senegal operate segregated cemeteries that each receive the dead of only one faith while other localities privilege open cemeteries that receive the dead of all faiths? I argue that open cemeteries occur in localities where the spread of world religions led to religion crosscutting and attenuating differences based on origins. Segregated cemeteries resulted in communities where the spread of world religions led to religion overlapping and reinforcing cleavages based on origins. I use this excavation of cemetery and urban histories along the Upper Guinea Coast to broach broad questions of mobility, identity, and inter-communal relations.