Marie DERIDDER

I am currently a postdoc researcher and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University in Sweden. I am also an associate researcher at Laboratoire d’anthropologie prospective, UCLouvain.

From 2001 to 2006, I studied sociology, anthropology and development studies at UClouvain in Belgium. My MA dissertation in sociology was awarded the Vanthournout Award in 2007. Then, I spent one year in the Inner Niger Delta in Mali on an individual research project funded by the Swiss cooperation. The aim was to investigate the decentralization of the Malian state and its impacts at the local level. In 2008, I obtained a 4-years grant from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) to carry out a doctoral research in the continuity of this previous project. My dissertation examined the decentralization of the state, elections and local elites, the commodification of natural resources, the relationship to the past and political transformations in rural Central Mali. I hold my PhD in Social Anthropology from UCLouvain in 2014 after the birth of my daughter. A reworked version of my dissertation was published by Karthala in 2021 under the title Elites, élection et transformations du politique au Mali. "Ceux qui cherchent le pouvoir sont parmi nous".

After the completion of my PhD, I worked several years in NGOs and trade unions’ international cooperation. Between 2016 and 2020, I was also a part-time lecturer at UCLouvain and UMons in Belgium, and at ISDR-Bukavu (DRC). I taught a number of courses, incl. Political Anthropology, Local Identities and Globalization, Socio-Anthropology of Migrations at the MA level, as well as Gender Studies, Qualitative Research Methods and Social Anthropology at the BA level.  

In September 2020, I was granted a 3-years Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF). I am developing a comparative research project (NEGOMOBI) on the making of the Euro-African ‘migration-development-security’ nexus in both Mali and Burkina Faso, and its practical negotiations and impacts on West African mobility in a postcolonial setting.

Since 2018, I am a member of the board of the Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD). Since 2021, I am a member of the editorial board of the journal Anthropology and development.

My main research areas are in political socio-anthropology, migration and mobility, policy-making processes and critical development studies “from below”, with a focus on actors’ practices and representations.

More info here on NEGOMOBI: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/895859 

Access to my publications here https://uclouvain.academia.edu/MDeridder