A. George Bajalia
A. George Bajalia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. His work is concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands.
His work argues that lives lived while waiting, whether in the city of Tangier among im/migrants or in the commodity warehouses that abut the land border between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and the Moroccan coast, form consequential habits that sediment into social life and become fields for potential political claims grounded in communal sentiments. As both an intellectual and political project, he is interested in exploring the consequences of these communal sentiments across the many borders of the Strait of Gibraltar and how these sentiments cannot be solely contained within the categories typically associated with border-crossing, categories such as “migrant,” “refugee,” and “asylum-seeker.”
Bajalia has held research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation-CAORC, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, an annual 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Bajalia received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Working Group: Refugee Cities