Manuela Boatcă's work transgresses territorial and disciplinary borders.
She has a background in English and German languages and literatures and a long-standing research interest in historical and comparative sociology. Her work encompasses postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender in modernity/coloniality, world systems analysis and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe and Latin America.

She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015.

Boatcă's paper draws on previous work on the commodification of citizenship rights for non-Western investors in order to draw a contrast between monetized and embodied social mobility. It argues that, unlike most male wealthy investors, who can achieve instant global mobility in exchange for a check (monetized mobility), women and feminized Others, particularly LGBTIQ and racialized individuals, exchange their gendered bodies in lengthy arrangements eventually resulting in upward mobility through residence or citizenship (embodied mobility). Thus, women’s and feminized Others’ access to social mobility as mediated through economic capital both involves more precarious means (their own bodies) and yields more precarious results than in the case of men and unmarked individuals. Building on examples of strategies employed by non-Western women of the middle and upper classes, the paper contends that women’s economic power partially counters the coloniality of power that has systematically relegated them to more precarious positions in the global mobility structure, yet in the process creates ambivalent fast tracks that change the content, but reproduce the terms of the same coloniality.

New Publications:

(2015) Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism, Ashgate(paperback edition Routledge 2016)

(2018): Caribbean Europe. Out of Sight, Out of Mind? In: Bernd Reiter (Ed.) Constructing the Pluriverse. Durham: Duke University Press, 197-218

(2018) Picker, Giovanni, Murji, Karim & Boatcă, Manuela (eds.) Racial Urbanities, special issue of Social Identities, 3/2018

(2017) with Komlosy, A., & Nolte, H. H. (Eds.) Global Inequalities in World-Systems Perspective: Theoretical Debates and Methodological Innovations. Routledge.

(2017): The Centrality of Race to Inequality Across the World-System, Journal of World-Systems Research 23 External link, opens in new window. (2), 465-473

(2017) Modernity, Citizenship and Occidentalist Epistemology in Max Weber and Beyond External link, opens in new window.