2024- 2025
Fellow at the Käthe-Hamburger Research Centre “global dis:connect,” LMU München

2019
Visiting Professor at Sciences Po, Paris

2016
Fellowship at International College Morphomata, Cologne

2013
Professor of Modern History, University of Cologne

2012
Visiting Professor, University of Mannheim

2009 – 2011
Senior Lecturer, University of Bielefeld

2010
Habilitation, Modern History, University BW Munich

2008
Senior research fellow, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

2007
Lecturer, University BW Munich and research fellow, University of Pretoria, South Africa

2005 – 2006
Research fellow, University of Cambridge, UK, Imperial History and African History, Feodor-Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation

2001 – 2005
Lecturer, University BW Munich

2001
PhD, University of Munich, Modern History

The research unit “The Production and Reproduction of Social Inequalities” addresses the overarching question of why attempts aimed at increasing equality often have contributed to generating more durable inequalities. As a way of addressing this general question, the research unit focuses on concepts and actors and their roles in producing and reproducing social inequalities in the context of colonial and postcolonial labor systems and regimes of mobility in the "Global South". In this study, inequalities are understood as relational and historically embedded and as comprising several dimensions, including social, economic, and epistemic inequality. More specifically, the research unit focuses on selected concepts that are locally grounded and describe forms of social inequalities linked to different types of labor exploitation, namely "native labor", "new slavery", "human trafficking", and "cheap/abundant labor". The members of the research unit investigate - both from a historical and contemporary perspective - how these concepts circulated on a global scale, and were negotiated, translated, and adapted by institutional and individual actors with the aim of challenging social inequalities, while eventually contributing to the production of those same, or new, inequalities. The research unit intends to reconcile debates on conceptual history, labor history, and inequality and combines perspectives from both South and North. Ultimately, it aims to interpret global labor regimes and to draw lessons from experiences for societies in both the “Global South” as well as the “Global North”.

Further Information

The sub-project C07 will address the history of health policy as a central planning and infrastructuring feature of welfare policy in Tanzania and will investigate how health-policy planning became an important tool for future-making in the newly independent country from 1961 onwards. The sub-project will concentrate on health-policy planning and the creating of health infrastructures in Tanzania after independence from 1961 to the 1980s, as other costly aspects of welfare policy such as pro-poor or pro-old-age policies were not yet considered feasible in the newly independent state of Tanzania. Many of the new African governments were confronted with considerable challenges in the field of health. When the colonial authorities left there were too few trained African doctors – in Tanganjika only 18 – not enough hospitals and a very limited number of African people with experience in health policy. The period from the 1960s to the 1980s became a phase of intensive planning and future-making. Tanzania used various Western welfare models, but also socialist/communist forms of health policy, drawing on experiences from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. However, Tanzanian politicians also had to rely on the infrastructures that had been implemented by the colonial administrations. Experts from the British administration remained rather powerful in the independent state, even if a strong nationalization policy was introduced (Eckert 2007). Additionally, in Tanzania, the development of health services was strongly connected with the land-use change and the collectivization approach of the Ujamaa programme which was initiated by the country’s first president Julius Nyerere and enforced in the 1970s (Lal 2015). The introduction of health centres was seen as an important tool to accompany the broad land-use change, to help the rural population and likewise to make the Ujamaa programme more attractive for peasants.
The sub-project will examine public-health-policy planning as a means to create a better future for the rural population and investigate the impact of various international models and the influence of transnational actors. It will also study how these new approaches were further developed by Tanzanian health politicians and doctors on the ground. A geographical focus will be the regional development in the Kilombero District, and particularly its health centre in Ifakara. Ifakara lies in the SAGCOT corridor, and the sub-project will thus contribute to the understanding of the history of rural and agricultural planning in one of the key areas of the CRC. The project generally highlights the connection between future planning, (changing) concepts of social welfare, and political legitimation.

PI Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lindner , PhD Student: Veronica Kimani, M.A.,  Partner: Dr. Musa Sadock, University of Dar-es-Salaam

Dauer: 2024-2025

Förderung: Ministeriums für Kultur und Wissenschaften NRW

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)

The project researches the intersecting, transnational networks the German medic, botanist, and immigration officer Wilhelm Hillebrand used to direct the wide-scale migration of bodies, plants, creatures, medicines and techniques to the Hawaiian Islands. Crossing the history of migration and the history of science, the project tackles the following issues: (i) how transnational scientific actors possessed and performed expertise as part of highly mobile careers in the 19^th century (ii9 whether colonial migration was a type of colonial science (iii) how to analyse the “colonial” in independent Hawai’I, and 8iv) the legacies of European global actor-networks in the 19^th century Pacific. The project will use close study of Wilhelm Hillebrand’s networking practices to investigate different conjunctures between knowledge, labour and migration in the mid-19^th century. Connected research on the careers, biographies, correspondence and ideas of Hillebrand’s global associates will develop insights about the porosity of emerging knowledge forms and scientific networks during the 19^th century, and their role in plantation-focused labour migration regimes.

Parallel to the abolition of Atlantic slavery, new forms of indentured labour stilled global capitalism's need for cheap, disposable labour. The famous 'coolie trade' – mainly Asian labourers transferred to French and British islands in the Indian Ocean, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, as well as to Portuguese colonies in Africa – was one of the largest migration movements in global history. Indentured contract workers are perhaps the most revealing example of bonded labour in the grey area between the poles of chattel slavery and 'free' wage labour. The interdisciplinary volume addresses historically and regionally specific cases of bonded labour relations from the 18th century to sponsorship systems in the Arab Gulf States today.

https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/forschung-1/forschungsrueckblick/ehemalige-forschungsfelder/migration-und-arbeit

Duration:

2014-2018