Michael Meeuwis
Languages and Cultures , Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Phone: +32 9 264 38 08
Email: Michael.Meeuwis@UGent.be
Research themes: Borders, migration governance and people on the move || Discrimination, racism and prejudice || Identity || Multilingualism, translation, interpreting and linguistic inequality
Michael Meeuwis (°1968) is professor at the department of African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 at the University of Antwerp with a sociolinguistic-ethnographic study of the languages used by the Congolese in Belgium and Flanders in particular. His areas of interest include the social, anthropological and sociolinguistic ontologies of the Congolese diaspora, including South-North but also South-South (within Africa) migration patterns; the role of the Congolese language Lingala in and for Congolese communities abroad; the history of Lingala; language policy in the DRC; discourse analysis in the context of migration; and others. He is a member of 'Babil', Fedasil's expert panel for language and communication in reception centers in Belgium and extends his expertise to refugee organizations and services in several European countries. For his Lingala classes at Ghent University, he closely collaborates with Belgians of Congolese origin.
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