Postdoctoral Investigators

Tilmann Heil is an academic staff member of the Iberian and Latin American History Department at Universität zu Köln and a Postdoctoral Investigator at Mecila where he also coordinates the research area [Hi]Stories of Conviviality. 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 the intersectional assemblages of social hierarchy in Rio de Janeiro. 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.

Tilmann holds a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology and an MPhil in interdisciplinary Migration Studies, both from the University of Oxford. Until 2020, he was a FWO Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre / Anthropology Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In the same period, he collaborated with Meron Zeleke on gendered migration from East and West Africa, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In the past, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at Universität Konstanz where he also coordinated a four-year doctoral programme.

Recent publications:
Heil, Tilmann (2020): “Comparing Conviviality. Living with Difference in Casamance and Catalonia”, in: Global diversities, 21, Basingstoke: Palgrave, Springer link.

Heil, Tilmann (2020): “Post/colonial reconfigurations: The disregarded, renewed arrival of Spaniards in Rio de Janeiro”, in: Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 18 (3), 326-340.

Heil, Tilmann and Meissner, Fran (2020): “Deromanticising integration: On the importance of convivial disintegration”, in: Migration Studies.

Heil, Tilmann (2019): “Muslim – Queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relative positionalities”, in: Ethnography, 1–20.

Heil, Tilmann (2019): “Conviviality as diasporic knowledge”, in: African Diaspora, 11 (1-2), 53–70.

Carlos Nupia is a researcher at the IAI and a Postdoctoral Investigator at Mecila, where he coordinates the Research Area “Medialities of Conviviality.” His doctoral thesis analyzed the adaptation of international policy models on science and technology in Latin American countries from the theoretical perspectives of policy transfer and historical institutionalism.

Carlos’ main research interest within the framework of conviviality focuses on the inequalities of knowledge circulation in peacebuilding interventions, particularly those in which heterogeneous knowledges coexist. Drawing on empirical evidence from the Colombian case, his research at Mecila explores the power and knowledge relations among the different actors involved in territorial peacebuilding activities.

Carlos is a journalist, holding a degree from the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and he obtained his PhD in Political Science from the FU Berlin with scholarships from DAAD and Colfuturo. He has extensive experience in the field of international scientific cooperation. Recently, he worked as a researcher at the IAI (2023–2024) and as administrative director at the German-Colombian Peace Institute (CAPAZ) from 2017 to 2023.