A. George Bajalia is a sociocultural anthropologist concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier and Ceuta. He has held research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation-CAORC, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference. His courses at Wesleyan explore the relationships between anthropology, performance, and curation; migration and borderlands; endurance and the otherwise; and theories of cultural and social change.

Representative Publications:

Refereed Articles