Semhar Haile MA
Assistentin / Doktorandin
Philosophisch-Historische Fakultät
Departement Gesellschaftswissenschaften
FG Cupers

Assistentin / Doktorandin

Petersgraben 52/Spalenvorstadt 2
4051 Basel
Schweiz

semhar.haile@unibas.ch

Semhar Haile is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies, in the SNF funded research project PRECURBICA. Her research aims to uncover strategies of urban living in the context of the looming climate crisis, with a particular focus on coastal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Through ethnographic inquiry, her research attempts to investigate the ways in which the city is being remade from its coastal margins through practices of incremental place making (land reclamation) by waterfront communities. In doing so, it aims to explore the socio-material relations that undergird the precarities of living on uncertain grounds while facing (new forms of) dispossession, namely the ongoing climate crisis.

Previously, Semhar worked as a policy analyst at the OECD Development Centre, and researcher at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), focusing on urban climate change, particularly in small and medium-sized African cities. She also has worked in refugee and migration studies as well as on practices of participatory research methods.

Semhar holds a BSc in Development Economics and an MA in Globalisation and Multinational Corporations (Public Policy) from SOAS, University of London.