Dr Bolaji Balogun

Department of Geography

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

b.balogun@sheffield.ac.uk

Geography and Planning Building

Full contact details

Dr Bolaji Balogun
Department of Geography
Geography and Planning Building
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND

Profile: Bolaji received his PhD (passed with no corrections) in Sociology from the University of Leeds and previously held a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship at Krakow University of Economics, Poland where he was a lecturer at the department of European Studies. In 2020, Bolaji moved to the University of Sheffield to take up another Leverhulme Trust Fellowship as an Early Career Fellow at the Department of Geography. Bolaji’s research focuses on Blackness and Racialisation in Central and Eastern Europe. As well as his academic outputs in this area, Bolaji has written for academic media outlets such as the Sociological Review Blog; Open Democracy, LSE Blogs, Discover Society, Baltic Worlds, and The Muslim News. Bolaji also serves as a peer-reviewer for a number of academic journals.

Research interests: Funded by the Leverhulme Trust (SAS-2017-046), Bolaji’s research uses in-depth interviews, focus group and survey to explore the lived experiences of People of Colour in Poland. Currently, it is the biggest qualitative and quantitative study of Black people yet conducted in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. Through the testimonies of this group, Bolaji’s research provides empirical grounding to the existing global understanding of race and national identity and adds to the geographical terrain of contemporary nationalism and identity studies. Bolaji’s research put to work Critical Race Theory in a sharply different context to its usual applications in the West. In doing so, he opens the theory to a new global application, able to re-centre questions of colonialism, domination, and non-European migration in a more peripheral, understudied location in Central and Eastern Europe. Although the main empirical thrust of Bolaji’s research is on CEE, his research speaks broadly to issues of race, racism, national identity, and coloniality in Europe.

Publications

Balogun B (2022) ‘Cold War Internationalism – the myth of Race-Blind Eastern Europe’ In Lipska M & Talarczyk M (Ed.), Hope Is of a Different Color. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Balogun B (2019) ‘Racialised Migration — from the Perspective of Colour in Poland’ In Górak-Sosnowska K, Pachocka M & Misiuna J (Ed.), Muslim Minorities and the Refugee Crisis in Europe

Balogun B (2021) Book Review: Why Race Still Matters. Sociology, 003803852110594-003803852110594.
Balogun B () Historicizing race. National Identities, 1-2.

Balogun B & Pędziwiatr K (2018) 'Poland: Sub-Saharan Africans and the struggle for acceptance'

Balogun B (2020) ‘If Poland’s government believes in ending discrimination, it should reassess its conception of Polish identity’.
Balogun B (2019) ‘Being Black At The Polish Seaside’,.
Balogun B ‘What motivated the 60,000 people who joined the far-right Polish Independence March?’, openDemocarcy..
Balogun B ‘World Cup exposes racism in Poland’, The Muslim News..
Balogun B ‘Poland: rewarded with UN security council membership whilst flirting with racism and nationalism’.
Balogun B ‘Call for multi-ethnic citizenship in Poland’, Baltic Worlds..
Balogun B ‘Poland to clamp down on anti-Semitism: HOW ABOUT ANTI-OTHERNESS?’, Baltic Worlds..
Balogun B ‘Contemporary Polish Racism: The Development of Neo-Communism?’, Discover Society..

Teaching interests