Ato Kwamena Onoma (PhD, Northwestern University) is a Professor in the Department of Political Science. His current work examines mobility, identity, belonging, and inter-communal relations through the prisms of epidemics and phobia, and the faith-based segregation of interment spaces. He is the author of two books: The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa (2009) and Anti-Refugee Violence and African Politics (2013). His fellowship research project is titled Mobility, Faith, and Segregated Cemeteryscapes. Ato is one of our 2024-25 JHI Faculty Research Fellows.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
My research these days focuses on the intersection of my longstanding interest in questions of identity with my burgeoning interest in the built environment. I am particularly interested in using the built environment as a canvas on which to read social relations and the elaboration of identities. My work on the faith-based segregation of cemeteries at JHI this year uses cemeteries grounds to explore inter-faith and broader intercommunal relations in West Africa. A second project that I am working on uses the ubiquitous largescale infrastructure projects around Africa since the turn of the 21st century to explore the intersection between neighborhoods claims to belonging in cities and state capacity for development interventions in urban areas.
What project(s) are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it (them)?
I am trying to complete a manuscript that explains why some communities strictly segregate cemeteries based on faith while others are open to the interment of the bodies of people of different faiths in the same cemetery. The project uses the spatial organization of interments as a prism to explore the broader question of how we think people of different faiths should interact in today’s diverse societies. The question of whether people of different faiths should attend the same schools, live in the same apartment complexes, marry each other and even use the same places of leisure are all contentious issues in societies around the world today. They raise the longstanding question of the relationship between individual rights and communal boundaries. In addition to helping me explore these major questions, the study of cemeteries, I have found, is also a particularly effective way of excavating the histories of human settlements and their shifting populations over time. I proposed this work in my application for a Faculty Research Fellowship because it neatly coincided with the JHI’s 2024-2025 them of Undergrounds/Underworlds.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at JHI so far even though I worry a lot these days that the fellowship is already coming to an end! I have learned a lot from the projects of the other fellows and the excursions organized for us have been enriching.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
I consider the humanities to be central to our efforts to understand humanity and the world in which we live. This may partly be because of my background. My undergraduate work was in Philosophy and English. Today, I think of myself as a social scientist whose work mostly employs historical methods and draws inspiration from humanistic work. Sembene Ousmane’s film Guelwaar has had a profound influence on my work on cemeteries.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I am an avid reader of fiction. Yaa Gyasi’s exploration of lives and journeys (both voluntary and coerced) in Homegoing is one that I both enjoyed and was inspired by. Her ability to present a sweeping view of history while giving detailed and intimate accounts of the lives of her characters is something that I am trying to learn from.
What is a fun fact about you?
I occasionally pluck the strings of a kora that I bought at the Abbaye de Keur Moussa in Senegal. My teacher quickly recognized that I was never going to replicate the skills of the great masters of the instrument but playing the one or two songs I succeeded in learning from him provides me with much peace.