Joseph Fosu-Ankrah

Joseph Fosu-Ankrah is a external PhD candidate in Graduate Programme African Studies. He holds a BA (Hons) in History with Study of Religions and an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. He also has training in Diaspora Studies as well as Theological Studies. He is currently part of The Madina Project coordinated by Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer and Dr. Samuel Ntewusu. The project investigates Modalities of Coexistence in Diversifying Societies, and it is a subsidiary of the larger project Religious Matters in an Entangled World Project coordinated by Prof Dr. Birgit Meyer of Utrecht University.

Fosu-Ankrah is working on a thesis which examines religious coexistence from a spatial and material dimension in Madina, a multi-religious and multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Accra. The research studies how everyday religious encounters and the everyday sharing of so-called urban or public spaces like the market, the football field and the lorry park by practitioners of Christianity, Islam and ATR shapes their notion of diversity and tolerance, inclusion and exclusion, and how these inform their perceptions and social relations with each other in terms of coexistence. In doing this, he combines both ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and theoretical reflections from a broad multidisciplinary perspective.

Research areas/interests: Spatial relations and spatial politics, religion and diversity, conflict and coexistence, religion and media, sense and aesthetics, religion and the public sphere, culture and heritage, religion and corporeality, religion and memory, the land question, youth agency and electoral politics, belonging and human rights.