David KananizadehNetwork Member
David Kananizadeh is a PhD candidate at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His research inquires social and economic forms and moral dimensions of sustaining ecology, life and subjectivation by looking into human-forest-entanglements in Sierra Leone. Before joining the Max Planck Institute in 2021, he held a scholarship from the Research Cluster “Society and Culture in Motion” at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (2018-2021).
His main research interests include human/nonhuman entanglements, work in pragmatism, phenomenology and STS, and questions of care and ethics.
Together with Sung-Joon Park, Sylvanus Spencer and Susan Erikson, he organized the LOST-summer school “From disaster to planetary care” in Freetown in 2019, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s “Knowledge for Tomorrow” program.
He is assistant editor of the 4S-Blog Backchannels.
Research
Sustaining Life and Ecology
David’s PhD project “Sustaining life and ecology in eastern Sierra Leone’s Forests” looks into human-forest entanglements in Sierra Leone by inquiring into the social and economic forms and moral dimensions of sustaining ecology, life and subjectivation. For this, he probes how inhabitants of eastern Sierra Leone’s forested landscapes, care, cultivate and foster – but also control, exploit and destroy – ecological relations in striving for well-being. David unfolds the multiplicity of moralizations of ecological relations by following the negotiations and reworkings of structurations of subsistence farming, logging and mining – those fields of practice forest dwellers navigate to sustain lives and ecology.
Publications
Involved projects
Sustaining Life and Ecology
This project looks into human-forest entanglements in Sierra Leone by inquiring into the social and economic forms and moral dimensions of sustaining ecology, life and subjectivation.
