Dr Jon Schubert is a political and economic anthropologist with long-time field research experience in urban Angola and Mozambique. His research interests include questions of political authority, the experience and memory of political violence, the impact of extractive industries and transnational trade on African polities, the social life of infrastructures, and sustainable urban development in times of climate crisis.
His monograph, Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola (Cornell University Press 2017), is a landmark ethnographic study of contemporary neo-authoritarianism seen through the prism of the emic notion of the ‘system’, and offers important theoretical insights on African politics, urbanism, capitalist development, identity politics, and the co-production of hegemony. His current research, the Afterlives of Extractive Capitalism, uses the economic architecture and transport infrastructures of the Angolan port town of Lobito as a lens to study the political and economic effects of cycles of commodity-dependent boom and bust in everyday life. Building upon the latest advances in the anthropological study of infrastructures, affect, and financialization, this research charts the affective reverberations of people’s engagement with the promises of development and modernity of the city’s economic infrastructure to interrogate the notion of crisis as an emergency.
He joined the working group ‘social and political anthropology’ at Konstanz in April 2021. Following his PhD at the University of Edinburgh (2014) he has held postdoc positions at the Universities of Leipzig and Geneva, after which he was the recipient of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, with which he carried out research on The Afterlives of Oil-Backed Infrastructures in the Port of Lobito, Angola at the anthropology department at Brunel University London (2018-2021). During this time, he was also a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex and a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.
In parallel to his doctoral research, Jon Schubert worked in commercial risk forecasting, where he was responsible for 10 Francophone and Lusophone countries in Central Africa; prior to this he worked in development consultancy and with the peace policy section of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. He regularly serves as a country expert for Angola in the European press and in asylum cases in the US and the UK. He is a co-editor of the International Africa Institute’s book series ‘Politics and Development in Contemporary Africa’ and a member of the editorial collective at Allegralab.