UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

Contact

Iberian and Latin American Department of the Historical Institute
Maria Sybilla Merian Center Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
DE - 50923 Cologne

Philosophikum
Room: EG 0.015

E-Mail: tilmann.heiluni-koeln.de

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram @tilmannheil

Web: https://tilmann.me

Vita

Tilmann Heil is trained a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology and an MPhil in interdisciplinary Migration Studies (both University of Oxford). His current research project Urban alliances is on the political approximations and shared struggles among long-term and new residents based on ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. His related book project Valued Difference tracks urban hierarchies and inequalities in Rio de Janeiro grounded in the account of newcomers. Since his doctoral work, he has sharpened the notion of conviviality in his book Comparing Conviviality as a process of interaction, negotiation and translation from which forms of minimal and fragile sociality emerge. He has addressed situations of ethnic and religious plurality and multilingualism.

Until 2020, he was a FWO PEGASUS Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at IMMRC/Anthropology at KU Leuven. In the same period, he collaborated with Meron Zeleke on gendered migration from East and West Africa, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. In the past, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre of Excellence "Cultural Foundations of Social Integration" at University of Konstanz where he also coordinated a four-year doctoral programme. His current and past research collaborations include the PPGAS/National Museum, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; the Fundação Casa Rui Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro), the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Cheikh Anta Diop University Dakar; InCoLaS, University of Tilburg, the Max Planck Institute of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Goettingen, Germany); and the Oxford Diaspora Programme (International Migration Institute, Oxford).

Research Areas

• Urban Studies
• Migration and Im/Mobility
• Transnationalism and Globalization
• Inequality and Social Stratification
• Conviviality, Cooperation and Conflict
• Race and Ethnicity
• Intersectionality and Queer
• Religion and Ethics

Most important publications

Heil, Tilmann 2020. Comparing conviviality. Living with difference in Casamance and Catalonia. Global diversities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Publisher, Springer link

Heil, Tilmann 2020. Post/colonial reconfigurations: The disregarded, renewed arrival of Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies (online first). doi: 10.1080/15562948.2020.1754994, OpenAccess

Heil, Tilmann, and Fran Meissner 2020. Deromanticising integration: On the importance of convivial disintegration. Migration Studies online first. doi: 10.1093/migration/mnz056, OpenAccess

Heil, Tilmann 2019. Muslim – Queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relative positionalities. Ethnography (online first): 1–20. doi: 10.1177/1466138119859601. Link

Heil, Tilmann 2019. Conviviality as diasporic knowledge. African Diaspora 11 (1-2): 53–70. doi: 10.1163/18725465-01101006. Link

Research Projects

Urban alliances. The politics between old and new residents (2020-2023)

Urban alliances asks how newcomers and longstanding residents in Brazilian cities, who face facets of the same post/colonial structures of exclusion, have differential access to privilege and citizenship, how they perceive each other, enter into dialogue, and labour to construct alliances at the fractured locuses they occupy. The project grounds in ethnographic fieldwork in cities like Rio de Janeiro (since 2014) and São Paulo (since 2019). The project conceptualises the politicization of newcomers alongside long-term residents in the 21^st century as well as the potential and challenges for solidarity among marginalized populations, be they immigrant, Black, Left and/or Queer. All of them clearly face violent realities of intersectional exclusion grounded in the structures of coloniality of which racism, conservativism, and capitalist exploitation are part. Still, newcomers to Latin American cities defend ethical and political positions that may hold a strong potential for tension and conflict within local contexts of political struggle. Whiteness, negritude, gender/sexuality, and political orientation do not necessarily mean the same to Brazilian residents and African or European newcomers. The project will renew the understanding of global asymmetries and how they configure locally in contemporary Brazil. The refined understanding of local politics and societal resilience will be relevant not only to Latin American cities but also cities in other locations in the Global South and in the Global North.

Valued Difference. Assembling Social Hierarchies in Rio de Janeiro

Based upon the experiences and views of urban dwellers in Rio de Janeiro, who arrived in the last 10 years from West Africa and Southern Europe, this project investigates how they relate to their new surroundings and become part of an urban population that is culturally diverse and socially stratified in complex and historically laden ways. I ask how they find a place in the city and how they see their own position relative to other urban dwellers. An important aspect is their ability to compare to the experiences made in the places they grew up in and passed through. Also, they contextualise their current experience with their imaginations and hopes for the future. I investigate this evaluation process with ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation, open-ended interviews and a mobile phone app with which my interlocutors document and share their experiences and reflections. I shift perspectives on urban socialities in a rapidly changing city in the global south by way of inquiring into the most recent migration movements. 

• Heil, Tilmann 2020. Interweaving the fabric of urban infrastructure: The emergence of a Senegalese presence in Rio de Janeiro. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (accepted).
• Heil, Tilmann 2020. Conviviality on the brink: Blackness, Africanness and marginality in Rio de Janeiro. In Luciane Scarato, Fernando Baldraia and Maya Manzi (eds.) Convivial Constellations in Latin America: From colonial ro contemporary times. London: Routledge.
• Heil, Tilmann 2020. Comparing conviviality. Living with difference in Casamance and Catalonia. Global diversities. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Heil, Tilmann 2020. Post/colonial reconfigurations: The disregarded, renewed arrival of Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies (online first). doi: 10.1080/15562948.2020.1754994.
• Heil, Tilmann 2019. Conviviality as diasporic knowledge. African Diaspora 11 (1-2): 53–70. doi: 10.1163/18725465-01101006.
• Heil, Tilmann, and Fran Meissner 2020. Deromanticising integration: On the importance of convivial disintegration. Migration Studies online first. doi: 10.1093/migration/mnz056.
• Heil, Tilmann 2019. Muslim – Queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relative positionalities. Ethnography (online first): 1–20. doi: 10.1177/1466138119859601.
• Heil, Tilmann, et al. 2017. Mobilities – Migratory experiences ethnographically connected: An introduction. New Diversities 19 (3): 1–11.
• Heil, Tilmann 2018. Uma infraestrutura muçulmana de chegada no Rio de Janeiro. REMHU : Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 26 (52): 111–129. doi: 10.1590/1980-85852503880005207.
• Heil, Tilmann 2019. Conviviality on the brink. Mecila Working Paper Series 14, Maria Sybilla Merian Centre Latin America.
• Heil, Tilmann 2017. Perder, só perder: Vendedores senegaleses durante os jogos olímpicos no Rio de Janeiro. In João Carlos Tedesco and Giselle Kleidermacher (eds.) A imigração senegalesa no Brasil e na Argentina: Múltiplos olhares, 229–254. Porto Alegre: EST Edições.
• Heil, Tilmann 2015. Living with difference locally, comparing transnationally: Conviviality in Catalonia à la Casamance. In Nando Sigona, Alan Gamlen, Giulia Liberatore and Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (eds.) Diasporas reimagined: Spaces, practices and belonging, 41–44. Oxford: Oxford Diasporas Programme.
• Heil, Tilmann 2015. Between phatic communion and coping tactic: Casamançais multilingual practices. Multilingual Margins 2 (1): 67–82. doi: 10.14426/mm.v2i1.58.
• Heil, Tilmann 2014. Dealing with Diversity and Difference in Public. Traces of Casamançais cohabitation in Catalonia? In Stanislaw Grodź and Gina Gertrud Smith (eds.) Religion, Ethnicity and Transnational Migration between West Africa and Europe, 98–122. Leiden: Brill.
• Heil, Tilmann 2015. Conviviality. (Re-)negotiating minimal consensus. In Steven Vertovec (ed.) Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies, 317–324. Oxford: Routledge.
• Heil, Tilmann 2012. Fragile convivialities. Everyday living together in two stateless but diverse regions, Catalonia and Casamance. COMPAS Working Papers WP-12-100. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/wp-12-100/. Accessed 19 May 2015.
• Heil, Tilmann 2014. Are neighbours alike? Practices of conviviality in Catalonia and Casamance. European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (4): 452–470. doi: 10.1177/1367549413510420.