Hagan, Ampson

Bio

Dr. Ampson Hagan is an assistant professor of anthropology whose research focuses on humanitarianism, rescue, humanitarian technology, unauthorized migration, Blackness, and troubling the notion of the human, within the context of contemporary Niger. Dr. Hagan’s work examines the alignment of humanitarianism with anti-migrant policing in Niger as that alliance targets unauthorized migrants for repatriation as part of Europe’s migration control operations that extend southward into Africa. With humanitarian organizations paying so much attention to African migrants in Niger, Dr. Hagan’s research examines how African migrants have become a relatively new subject of humanitarianism, alongside its historical subject, the refugee. Dr. Hagan’s research considers how the Blackness of the African migrant in Niger represents a problem for humanitarianism and its concept of rescue, and questions if such rescue is possible under the global regime of anti-Blackness and xenophobia.

As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Hagan is attuned to the ways that ethnographic inquiry can explore how people and society pursue particular health outcomes and political claims to life through humanist and humanitarian practices. Through this work, Dr. Hagan has engaged various communities in Niger with his research, including the Liberian immigrant community living in Niamey. In addition to local community groups in Niger, Dr. Hagan’s ethnographic research has forged connections with large and local organizations providing various form of assistance to migrants in Niger, as well as Nigérien authorities policing the territory, trying to stop unauthorized migration into Niger.

The goal of this work is to produce a scholarship that is informed by and in collaboration with unauthorized migrants such that their experiences, perspectives, and analysis of the humanitarian and migration control measures that target them accurately reflect their worldview. By elucidating the links between humanitarian/development organizations that purport to help migrants and the various anti-migration actors operating in Niger, this research project will provide migrants, community stakeholders, and policymakers a more complete picture of how the humanitarian-policing assemblage attempts to “rescue” migrants through repatriation. His research has been supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the West African Research Association, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the American Anthropological Association.

Before arriving at the University of Maryland, Dr. Hagan was the Dean’s Research Associate Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University from 2022–2024. Dr. Hagan completed his PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022.