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Function

Group Leader of the Junior Research Group - Politics of the Unknown. Conspiracism and Conflict

Personal Information

Joschka Philipps is Junior Research Group Leader at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, and interim professor for the Sociology of Africa Chair in the fall term 2024/25. He co-directs the interdisciplinary project “Fluid Ontologies of Contestation. Social media, anti-government protest and transnational decolonization movements in Burkina Faso” and is member of the Global Qualitative Sociology Network.

Joschka Philipps’s current research is concerned with the relationships between conflict and uncertainty. He analyses how rumours and conspiracy theories act as conjectural tools that help people and groups transform uncertainty into collective points of reference that they can act upon. His ongoing work focuses on biographical approaches to the lifeworlds of so-called conspiracy theorists in France and Guinea and on how suspicion and revelations inform political discourses on social media in Burkina Faso. Previously, Joschka worked on gangs, clans, and staffs in Conakry, the capital city of Guinea, and the role that these youth collectives played in political protests, also in comparison with similar phenomena in other cities, such as Kampala, Uganda and London, England. Methodologically, Joschka draws on ethnographic approaches, interviews, discourse analysis, comparative methods, but also on surveys and descriptive statistics, as well as interdisciplinary methods in collaboration with data scientists and artists.

He is the author of ‘Ambivalent Rage. Youth Gangs and Political Protest in Conakry, Guinea’ (2013), which won the VAD Junior Researcher Award, and the co-editor of the special issue ‘La Guinée depuis Condé’ (2023 by Politique Africaine) as well as the edited volume ‘Education in Fragile Contexts: Government Practices and Political Challenges’ (2011). His articles have appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of African Political Economy, Africa Spectrum, and the Journal of Youth Studies, as well as in the Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies. Previously, Joschka Philipps was a Senior Researcher at the Swiss Peace Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Basel. As a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he worked at Columbia University in New York, at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, at Les Afriques dans le Monde, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France, and at the Université de N’Zérékoré, Guinea. He also worked as a lecturer at the Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo (UJKZ) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (2023-24). Joschka holds a Magister (MA) in Political Science, Sociology and Psychology (University of Freiburg i.Br.), and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Publications