MSCA Individual Fellowship

Marie Schnitzler gets a Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for her project DisaMob



The DisaMob project -Disability and social mobility in Johannesburg - led by Marie Schnitzler, post-doctoral student at the ULiège Social and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory (IRSS/Faculty of Social Sciences), aims to rethink the processes of social mobility in South Africa by taking into account the issue of disability.

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ince the end of apartheid, the role of racial categories in the reproduction of inequality appears to have diminished in South Africa, but the extent of these changes remains debated. The DisaMob project aims to review our understanding of these processes by taking a cross-cutting approach to understanding post-apartheid society. To do so, Marie Schnitzler’s research will rely on three original elements. First, this project will integrate the issue of disability into the study of social mobility. The study will thus look at the life trajectories of people living with a physical disability: a starting point for engaging individuals of different races and social classes. Second and in contrast with leading approaches in the field (i.e. statistical surveys on social mobility and the Marxist tradition of social classes in South Africa), Marie Schnitzler will draw from Bourdieu's multidimensional analysis of social space to articulate the impacts of racial and social categories, but also of disability and gender, on professional careers. Third, the professional careers of people with disability will be analyzed in the light of their social configurations (expectations and demands for support from relatives and friends) which shape them, as forms of interdependence with ambiguous effects. For example, could the delegation of care to women explain why women with disabilities find work less easily than their male peers?

For this project, Marie Schnitzler will spend two years at the University of Johannesburg with the objectives (a) to conduct ethnographic research, (b) to deepen her knowledge of current social science debates in this country, and (c) to expand her network with local researchers. In return, the knowledge acquired and the research results will serve as a benchmark for the second phase of research undertaken at the University of Liège (one year).

Supervisor: Benjamin Rubbers, Anthropologist at LASC

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships

The Individual Fellowship Projects of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions are European postdoctoral fellowships of excellence awarded to brilliant researchers wishing to develop their scientific career through a mobility experience in Europe rich in scientific exchanges and teaching.

The University of Liège has already been awarded several dozen projects of excellence funded by this program.

THE PROJECTS FundeD AT ULIÈGE

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