Christian Doll

Bio

I am a cultural anthropologist focused on political and urban dynamics in Africa. My research explores how ethnic identity, humanitarian governance, conflict, sovereignty, and ideas of the future manifest in everyday urban life. I have been doing ethnographic research in South Sudan since 2012, one year after it became the world’s newest nation-state. In my work on South Sudan, I explore how the idea of the state and conceptualizations of the future are imagined and made real in light of a broader postcolonial and neoliberal context that I argue might best be conceptualized as “post-state.”

At NC State, I regularly teach Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Humanitarianism and International Justice, Urban Anthropology, Technology in Society and Culture, and Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. I teach a seminar for the Honors College called Revolution, Resistance, and the State. In summer 2025, I will launch an interdisciplinary summer research course called Researching the City. Through it, students will learn qualitative methods and social scientific theory as they carry out ethnographic research in Raleigh.

I have previously taught at the University of California, Davis and the University of Juba in South Sudan.

Projects

I am currently revising my book, State of Becoming: Making the City and Imagining the Future in Independent South Sudan, for the University of Minnesota Press.

I am also conducting two collaborative research projects. One project is a study of a small-scale money-transfer network with centers throughout northern and eastern Africa. The network is run by South Sudanese humanitarian professionals who aim to disrupt aid dependency by offering an alternative financial infrastructure to South Sudanese displaced by recent and ongoing political conflict. I use the network as a vantage point to understand future-oriented action, the creation of communities of displaced South Sudanese in and around urban spaces, and the creative ways people generate new forms of work and exchange outside the confines of state-driven directives and humanitarian governance.

My other project is an ongoing collaboration with Okuja Vincent, a Ugandan artist and art therapist I first met while working with the Peace Corps in Uganda. We aim to bring together his visual representations of South Sudan and northern Uganda and his reflections on his long-term use of art therapy among youth impacted by the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict to produce a digital gallery and book.

Graduate Advising

As an Affiliate Graduate Faculty Member, I teach courses that carry graduate credit and advise students in the M.A. program in Anthropology.

Research Publications

“How Thöŋ Piny Became Juba Na Bari: Placemaking and Social Memory in Urban South Sudan,” IJURR: The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2024

“Sovereignty from ‘Ground Zero’: Power through Performance in Independent South Sudan,” Nations and Nationalism. 2022

“Returning, Remaining and Remaking: Urban Space in Post-conflict Transition,” co-authored with Naseem Badiey, Parangolé: A Journal about the Urbanized Planet. Issue 1: 82-85.

“Improvising Juba: Productive Precarity, ‘Companies,’ and Making the Present at the Edge of the Indian Ocean World,” in Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds, Edited by Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng’weno, and Neelima Jeychandran, Routledge. 2020

“Planning Amidst Precarity: Utopian Imaginings in South Sudan,” co-authored with Naseem Badiey. The Journal of Eastern African Studies, 12(2): 367-385. Also published in Urban Africa and Violent Conflict Edited by Karen Büscher, Routledge, 2019

Funded Research

Dissertation Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation; Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, National Science Foundation

Area(s) of Expertise

Anthropology of Africa; Political Anthropology, the State, and State-Making; Futurity and Temporality; Cities, Urban Space, Place-Making; Ethnographic Methodology; Migration and Mobilities; Revolution and Post-Liberation Politics; Visual Anthropology