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SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship for Jon Schubert
ZASB alumnus Jon Schubert receives a prestigious SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship that enables him to lead a research group as an assistant professor at the University of Basel. His project will ethnographically study urban adaptation to climate risk in coastal cities in Africa.
Jon Schubert has been awarded an SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to carry out his new project "PRECURBICA — Precarious Urbanisms in Coastal Africa". The project will ethnographically investigate the impact of climate risk on social and infrastructural processes in four African coastal cities. By focusing on African actors and expertise, the project develops an environmental justice-centred critique of the capital-intensive techno-utopias that typically dominate ‘global’ debates on resilience and infrastructural adaptation to climate change. The project is funded for five years and will start from 1 April 2022 at the Urban Studies unit of the University of Basel.
Jon Schubert was one of the first graduates of the master's degree program African Studies at the University of Basel (2008). He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2014) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Leipzig and Geneva. He then carried out a project on infrastructures and crisis funded by the Leverhulme Trust at Brunel University, London, and was a visiting professor in anthropology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He is currently a senior lecturer in the political anthropology working group at the University of Konstanz.
In 2021, the SNSF received 244 Eccellenza proposals. Jon Schubert's proposal was among the 32 that were selected for funding after a two-stage evaluation process.
The ZASB commends Jon on his achievement and looks forward to having its alumnus on board.
