Dr. Lucas Cé Sangalli awarded the 2026 Norbert Elias Book Prize

Dr. Lucas Cé Sangalli has been awarded the 2026 Norbert Elias Book Prize for his book Migrants from Sudan in Germany and Jordan: Changing Belongings in the Context of Life and Family Histories (Göttingen University Press, 2024). The 2026 prize was awarded by the Norbert Elias Foundation and recognizes an original and outstanding scholarly monograph published between 2023 and 2025 that is significantly inspired by the work of sociologist Norbert Elias.

The international prize committee selected the book unanimously. The award highlights the book’s contribution to figurational
sociology and its innovative integration of historical and biographical research.

Based on extensive empirical research conducted in Germany and Jordan, the book examines how people from different regions of Sudan make sense of migration, experiences of violence, family histories, and social belonging. Combining biographical and family interviews with the analysis of historical documents and archival sources, the study reconstructs how long-term social processes – including Islamization, Arabization, enslavement, colonialism, and forced migration – continue to shape social interdependencies and lived experiences across generations.

Drawing on Norbert Elias’s process sociology, the book shows how collective histories become embedded in family narratives and shape the transmission of we-images and they-images over time. By connecting long-term historical developments with life histories, the study offers new insights into the relationship between migration, memory, inequality, and belonging.

Dr. Cé Sangalli is a researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on migration processes, collective histories, and global inequalities, with particular attention to the intergenerational transmission of experiences and the entanglements of enslavement, colonialism, and migration.

The Norbert Elias Book Prize carries a prize of €1,000 and is awarded by the Norbert Elias Foundation.


Publication

Cé Sangalli, Lucas (2024): Migrants from Sudan in Germany and Jordan: Changing Belongings in the Context of Life and Family Histories. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press.
The book is available in open access via Göttingen University Press.