Susanna Fioratta

Susanna Fioratta is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research explores questions of mobility, belonging, personhood, and how people manage insecurity in everyday life. Her first book, Global Nomads: An Ethnography of Migration, Islam, and Politics in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines a case of migration in the West African Republic of Guinea that challenges simplistic assumptions about migration as a crisis to be resolved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea and among Guinean migrants in Senegal, the book shows how migration can be an ordinary practice full of social and personal meaning, and that desires to go abroad are not infrequently intertwined with dreams of building a future at home. Fioratta has also written about political rumor and conspiracy theory, migration and commerce between Guinea and China, gendered social expectations in an Islamic reform movement, rethinking ethnography, marriage as a path to adulthood, and the social implications of work and money.

Degrees/Education:
Ph.D. and M. Phil, Yale University
B.A., Macalester College