The Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research is delighted to announce that our Postdoctoral Fellow, Mbasughun Ukpi, has received a prestigious Post-PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
As one of the most competitive international awards in anthropology, this grant recognizes Mbasughun's innovative study of West-to-East African mobility. Her project is titled "Eating Nigeria in Uganda: Food Memories and the Affective Making of the Migrant Self."
While migration scholarship often focuses on movement toward Europe or North America, the most significant shifts in 21st-century mobility are happening within the African continent. Today, over 21 million Africans reside in other African nations, a demographic shift that requires a nuanced, intra-continental lens to understand the mechanics of belonging. Through an ethnographic study of the Nigerian community in Kampala, Mbasughun is opening a critical thinking space on this dynamic.
The research reframes the kitchen as a site for investigating how affective labor and culinary memory are translated into social networks and the material foundations of life in the city. By examining these everyday practices, the project explores how migrant identity is a lived project of placemaking in the heart of East Africa.
Congratulations to Dr. Mbasughun Ukpi.