dr Magdalena Chułek

m.chulek
@uw.edu.pl

Magdalena Chułek is a researcher at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw. She is an anthropologist with experience in designing, organising and carrying out qualitative research. She has implemented projects in Poland, Sudan, Great Britain and Tanzania. In 2012, she was awarded a research grant from the National Science Centre for her research project “Help in Africa’s Slums – Local and Western Strategies in Kibera and Korogocho,” which enabled her to carry out long-term field research in Kenya. Using the method of participant observation during her several-month stay among the studied community in so-called slums, she dealt with the sociocultural process of how these spaces are created. In 2021, at the Faculty of Social Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University, she defended her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “How slums are (re)produced: a case study of inhabitants of Kibera and Korogocho in Nairobi”. Her current research interests encompass forced migrations and adaptive strategies to environmental changes, particularly in refugee camps and slums in East Africa and South Asia. In connection with these issues, since 2023, she has been leading a project aimed at comprehensively understanding the challenges and strategies of the elderly population residing in selected marginalized areas in Nairobi and Dhaka.

Since May 2023has been acting as International Relations Coordinator. She coordinates the Centre’s activities involving individual and institutional international partners.

Selected publications

• Magdalena Chułek, Jak wytwarzany jest slums? Studium przypadku mieszkańców Kibery i Korogocho w Nairobi.
• Magdalena Chułek, A thief on the stack. An analysis of illegal behaviour: lynching in the Kibera Slum (Kenya)
• Magdalena Chułek, Mob Justice and Everyday Life: The Case of Nairobi’s Kibera and Korogocho Slums
• Magdalena Chułek, Hustling the mtaa way: How bottom-up economic relations create stability in the slums

Research projects

• Ageing in (un)habitability: role of environment perception and place attachment in coping and adaptation strategies on the example of slums in Nairobi and (duration: 2023 - 2026)
• Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe: Institutions, Interests and Policies (PRIME) (duration: 2023 - 2026)
• A multi-directional analysis of refugee/IDP camp areas based on HR/VHR satellite data (duration: 2020 - 2023)