About the Project

Travail-Travel-Traders is a research project funded by a Swiss National Foundation (SNF) Ambizione Grant, running from 2020 to 2024, led by Lesley Braun, principal investigator (PI). This project is hosted by the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

The growing interconnectivity between China and Africa, especially with regard to African migrants, reveals all manner of transnational trajectories, connections, and trading practices. Travail-Travel-Traders is premised on considering the lives of women involved in trade between the African continent and China.

Some of the affiliated research questions posed:
• How do women involved in trade navigate political infrastructures governed by local systems of patronage?
• What role do cultural encounters play in not only new business networks, but in shaping local perceptions of China, and more specifically local perceptions of women who do business in China?
• How are categories of the informal and formal conceived by trader women and the state? 
• How have supply chains been disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

The intersections between economic anthropology and gender and sexuality highlight that as women’s work changes, so do gender relations and circulating norms about femininity and womanhood. This research builds on overlapping areas of scholarship: emergent markets and new mobilities between China and Africa; gender and sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa; the anthropology of work.