Drawing by Lisa Bonard

Marion Fert is a doctoral assistant at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Neuchâtel. Her PhD dissertation is concerned with career plans and life trajectories of young refugee graduates of Congolese origin in the Great Lakes region in Africa. Case studies include Rwanda and Tanzania. Focusing on the relation between forced and protracted migrations and (im)mobility, her work takes a critical approach to examining the social, political and identity transformations generated by forced displacements and humanitarian interventions. 

She also completed her MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel. Her master thesis was part of the SNF funded research project “education in spaces of exception in Tanzania and Rwanda” and zoomed in on the educational pathways and lived experiences of young refugees studying at a Rwandan University. Keyquestions addressed refugee students’ agency in their relation to humanitarian bureaucracies and their entanglement with wider networks dynamics, social relations and identities. Marion’s PhD thesis builds on this 7-month ethnographic (field)work and aims to shed light on the ways highly educated people navigate through landscapes of structural exclusion and great uncertainty (prevailing the Great Lakes region for decades).

Institutional affiliations

• Member of the editorial board of Tsantsa, Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association 
• Member of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA)
• Member of the Société suisse d’études africaines (SSEA)
• Member of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM)