Foto: Prof. Dr. Sandra Calkins

Social and Cultural Anthropology with focus on Africa

In this research field, we analyze contemporary economic-ecological fault lines with a special focus on African contexts, because these bring central political and moral questions of our time into sharp relief. We investigate how knowledges about the environment and the economy emerge, circulate, are brought together, contradict themselves, are contested, politicized and shape the futures of health and wellbeing for human and more-than-human lives. In the light of historical inequalities and the geopolitical dominance of Western knowledge systems, our approach to knowledge-making is deliberately broad and attuned to building resources, collaboratively with scholars from the continent, to expand societal horizons of imagination beyond narrow ambitions of economic growth. Our research and teaching explore the intersections of economic anthropology, environmental anthropology/environmental humanities and postcolonial science and technology studies (STS) with an emphasis on African contexts and their global entanglements.
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