Michelle Johnson is Associate Dean of Faculty for the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual in Africa and the contemporary African diaspora (i.e., Africans in Europe and the United States), she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and with Guinean immigrants in Portugal. She has held grants from the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion in Africa, African Studies Review, Anthropology Quarterly, and Food and Foodways. She is author of Re-making Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon - Mecca - Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2020) and co-author (with Edmund "Ned" Searles) of Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, 2021). She also provides expert testimony on asylum cases pertaining to West Africa and the contemporary African diaspora on topics such as genital cutting, forced marriage, and religious persecution and freedom. She teaches courses on cultural anthropology, the anthropology of religion, African Studies, and the life course and was awarded Bucknell University's 1956 Lectureship for Inspirational Teaching in 2019.
Disability, Ethnic discrimination or persecution, Female genital mutilation/circumcision/FGC, Forced marriage, LGBTQ, Religious discrimination or persecution, Safe internal relocation, Tribal discrimination or persecution, Violence against children/child abuse
I have worked on a total of 9 asylum cases, providing expert testimony related to female genital cutting, men's and women's initiation rituals, forced marriage, and religious persecution/religious freedom. I have testified on behalf of clients from Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, mostly who self-identify as members of Mandinga and Fulani ethnic groups. I produced an expert report for each of these cases and provided verbal testimony (over the phone) in 2 of these cases.
Re-making Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon - Mecca - Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2020), Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, 2021), "Never Forget Where You're From: Raising Guinean Muslim Babies in Portugal," In A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies (Cambridge, 2017), "Guinea-Bissau," in Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices (Thomas Riggs, 2014),"Seven Things To Know about Female Genital Surgeries in Africa" (Hastings Center Report, 2012), "Making Mandinga or Making Muslims? Debating Female Circumcision, Ethnicity, and Islam in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal," In Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context (Rutgers, 2007), "Becoming a Muslim, Becoming a Person: Female 'Circumcision,' Religious Identity, and Personhood in Guinea-Bissau," in Female "Circumcision" in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change (Lynne Rienner, 2000),