Konstantin Biehl

Konstantin BiehlNetwork Member

Konstantin is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo and the University of Edinburgh. He is part of ANTHUSIA, a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. His project takes up questions of toxic exposure, agricultural production, and knowledge-making related to mould infections of maize in Upper Meru, Kenya. Before his PhD he studied Social Anthropology and Economics at the University of Halle.

Konstantin is interested in knowledge production in human bodies and contexts of toxicity, but also generally in invisible sites, under uncertain conditions and in the future. His research interests include epistemologies, questions of (un)certainty, anthropology of the body and STS.

Together with Miriam Waltz and Ferdinand Okwaro he organized the Workshop “Scientific Subjectivities in Contemporary Africa: Knowledge Making, Scholarly Collaboration and Academic Lives across Difference” at the British Institute for East Africa, Nairobi in 2019.

Current position
PhD Researcher
University affiliation
University of Oslo/University of Edinburgh

Research

Toxic Exposure to Mould in Food
Confronting the Uncertainty of Toxic Exposure: Knowledge‐making on Aflatoxins in Kenyan Maize

Konstantin’s PhD project investigates how farmers, consumers and traders produce and translate knowledge on toxic exposure caused by aflatoxin producing mould in Meru, Central Kenya. For this, he follows the processes of growing, harvesting, processing, storing, trading, and eating maize to inquire how people without access to testing infrastructure render toxicity visible and manageable. Ensuing from these local practices, Konstantin traces how local knowledge on toxicity as well as socio-economic practices of the valuation of food, land, and labour are framed by a larger economy of (mis)trust in the state and institutions of protection in Kenya.

Publications