2019
Habilitation (venia legendi: Social and Cultural Anthropology), University of Cologne

2013 - present
Scientific Managing Director of the Global South Studies Center (GSSC), University of Cologne

2010 - 2013
Senior Research Fellow in collaborative research unit "Resilience, Collapse and Reorganization in Social-Ecological-Systems of African Savannahs", University of Cologne

2009 - 2010
Visiting Assistant Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg

2008
PhD Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg

2005 - 2007
Junior Research Fellow, collaborative research center SFB 389 ACACIA, University of Cologne

• Economic Anthropology
• (Energy) Infrastructure
• Migration
• Rural-urban relations
• Land-use change
• Political ecology
• Human-environmental relations
• Pastoralism
• Agrarian change
• Eastern and Southern Africa

Description:
What dynamics of future-making are associated with the implementation of large-scale renewable energy projects in a previously marginalized dryland area? Focusing on community-investor relations, this project explores the risks and opportunities, land-use changes and governance of infrastructures at the interface of global and local dynamics.

Support:
DFG

Duration:
2021 - 2025

https://crc-trr228.de/c02-energy-futures/

Global demand for natural cosmetics and organic care products has led to increasing commodification of numerous ecological niche species. This project focuses on the sourcing of arboreal essential oils, which are an important ingredient mainly due to their fragrant properties. Growing demand increases pressure on these wild, rare, and often endangered resources, and also gives rise to calls for more conservation efforts. This leads to the search for alternatives to wild collections, such as plantation cultivation or attempts at biochemical development of near-natural or nature-identical alternatives. This project sets out to explore these processes from two angles. One the one hand, it explores the political ecology of arboreal essential oils, and, on the other hand, it examines the substitutability of wild for bioengineered ingredients. The thus project explores the materiality and making of olfactory value chains in Africa and Europe, and – by using approaches from sensory ethnography and immersing in the worlds of olfactory experts – the creation and valuation of smell, its associative relations with wilderness, and the consequences of sensory difference on sourcing practices in Kenya, Namibia and South Africa. More broadly, the project explores how things become resources, and raises critical questions about the commercial use of rare natural products in times of global environmental change and neoliberal conservation.

Funding: DFG since 2023

https://commodifying-the-wild.de/projects/smelling-the-wild/

The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) is a research conglomerate funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It aims at understanding African futures and how they are “made” in rural areas by investigating land-use change and social-ecological transformation. The Universities of Bonn and Cologne (UoC) have a track record of collaborations in this regional and thematic field of interest, combining complementary expertise from a wide range of disciplines in natural and social sciences. “Future-making” refers to physical changes as well as social practices that shape future conditions by making the future an issue in the present. 

The first funding phase of the CRC focused on the two seemingly opposite, yet often mutually constitutive processes of agricultural intensification and conservation. This focus is widened in the current phase to include infrastructuring as a third essential process. With infrastructuring we refer to the establishment of large-scale infrastructure, which we consider as an additional driver of land-use change and social-ecological transformation. All three processes – intensification, conservation, and infrastructuring – contribute, in often overlapping dynamics, to grand-scale transformations in our research areas with multiple micro-scalar repercussions. The CRC conceptualizes such processes of social-ecological transformation as expressions of “future-making”. This builds on the hypothesis that imagined futures and the different ideas about how they can be realized have a decisive impact on current land-use dynamics. The projects of the CRC analyse how different approaches to the future, and also surprises and unintended side-effects, inform the politics and practices of large-scale land-use change, and how they relate to each other.

Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Cooperation Partners: University of Bonn, Dep. of Geography

Website: crc-trr228.de

Duration: 2nd Funding Phase: 2022-2025 (4 years)

Period: 2013-2017

The central aim of project B4 is to understand the impact of human migration on the social-ecological systems (SES) in migrants’ home areas. The project seeks to advance knowledge on the migration-environment-nexus on a conceptual as well as empirical level: Conceptually, the project seeks to develop and synthesize the discussion on two broad topics, which until today remain widely unconnected, namely translocality and social-ecological resilience. Empirically, the project aims to employ the synthesized framework on translocality and resilience through comparative research into rural-urban relations.

https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/237677871?language=en.

Description:
What dynamics of future-making are associated with the implementation of large-scale renewable energy projects in a previously marginalized dryland area? Focusing on community-investor relations, this project explores the risks and opportunities, land-use changes and governance of infrastructures at the interface of global and local dynamics.

Support:
DFG

Duration:
2018 - 2021

Description:
Across CRC study areas projects work on overarching research questions:
Will conservation lead to well-being and a reduction of poverty? Will agricultural intesification create wealth? How are educational status/gender/age of individuals related to houshold decisions and related outcomes? How is migration linked to future making processes?
Answering these questions requires a systematic approach to longitudinal farm-household data collection.

Support:
DFG

Duration:

Period: 2013-2018

Food production in many areas in East Africa shows stagnating or declining trends, with demographic growth, land degradation and climate variability being the main culprits. Wetlands, on the other hand, have year-round water availability and generally high resource base quality and present potential production hotspots. They cover 20 Mio ha in the four target countries with only a small proportion currently being used. We surmise that wetlands become the breadbasket of the region. A BMBF-funded consortium from Bonn-Cologne-Jülich and several African partners will assess the wetlands’ contribution to food security and the sustainability of current use along climatic and social gradients.The island-like wetlands within arid zones, in particular, are of enormous value for the livelihoods of local communitiesWork package socio-economic evaluation aims to provide an understanding of the social, economic and cultural factors that shape patterns of access to and use of wetlands. In close collaboration with colleagues from public health and social geography, this project will analyze dynamic land use patterns and scrutinize how health issues impact them. Research will also address gender dynamics regarding wetland access, use and benefit. Crop management systems and their potential contribution to the livelihoods of the surrounding communities will be evaluated.

https://www.wetlands-africa.uni-bonn.de/project-1.

Duration:

2021-2022

https://bipon.uni-koeln.de/master-projects