2018
Amal Hassan Fadlalla is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests and teaching focus on global issues and perspectives related to gender, health, reproduction, diaspora, transnationalism, population, development, and human rights and humanitarianism. She holds B.sc and Masters degrees from the University of Khartoum, Sudan (1986, 1992) and a PhD from Northwestern University (2000).
Professor Amal Hassan Fadlalla is the recipient of many prestigious awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, Harvard Population and Development Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the Human Rights and Humanity awards from the University of Michigan. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript on Sudanese activism in the diaspora.
Kerry Holden is lecturer and research fellow in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). Her research interests are in exploring knowledge cultures and practices transnationally. She focuses on examining the managerial, administrative and professional dimensions of science and technology, analysing the significance of political and moral economies that support how science travels and becomes politically viable. Prior to joining QMUL, Kerry completed her PhD at King’s College London and undertook a postdoctoral research fellowship at Concordia University in Montreal examining the emergence of computer science communities in East Africa.
2017
Grace Akello is currently an Associate Professor and Coordinator of a pioneer Master of Medical Anthropology Programme in Gulu University. She is also a Ruth Glass Fellow with a residency at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her training in Medical Anthropology were in the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University, in The Netherlands – where she was a NUFFIC and WOTRO fellow respectively. Since 2012, she was appointed a Research Fellow at the African Studies Centre in Leiden University. Her main research interests include how children and young people in complex emergencies and the context of HIV/AIDS identify, prioritise and manage their health complaints. In this regard, she has published many articles and book chapters focusing on former child soldiers, silencing distressed children as a coping strategy in the context of war, The oughtness of care during the 2000/2001 ebola epidemic. Her book, Wartime children’s suffering and quest for therapy in northern Uganda was awarded a PhD premium by the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, in the academic year 2008/2009.
Amal Hassan Fadlalla is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests and teaching focus on global issues and perspectives related to gender, health, reproduction, diaspora, transnationalism, population, development, and human rights and humanitarianism. She holds B.sc and Masters degrees from the University of Khartoum, Sudan (1986, 1992) and a PhD from Northwestern University (2000).
Professor Amal Hassan Fadlalla is the recipient of many prestigious awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, Harvard Population and Development Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the Human Rights and Humanity awards from the University of Michigan. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript on Sudanese activism in the diaspora.
Hlonipha Mokoena is currently an Associate Professor at WISER. Before June 2015 she worked in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. She is the author of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual and has a strong research interest in South African intellectual history. Her new research is on the figure of the Zulu policeman, which she explores across the visual historical archive. Hlonipha is a multitalented public intellectual, well known for her work in many different parts of the world, and very strongly placed to both write and speak about the complex entanglements as well as the striking differences between South African and US cultures.
2016
Susan Erikson is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby. She is an anthropologist who has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During a first international affairs career, Dr. Erikson worked for or with government departments and agencies on issues of international development, foreign policy, and trade. As an academic, Dr. Erikson combines her practical work experience with a critical study of the relations of power informing global health scenarios. Her focus is global health and she conducts ethnographic research on global health futures, humanitarian aid, biomedical knowledge production, expertise, governmentality, and the political economy of global health, particularly data use and financing.
Her recent publications are: Global Health Business: The Production and Performativity of Statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany (2012: Medical Anthropology, Special Issue: Enumeration, Identity, and Health, 32(4):367-384) & Social Embodiments: Prenatal Risk in Postsocialist Germany (2012: Anthropologica 54(1):83-94).
Pamila Gupta is Associate Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research explores Lusophone (post)colonial links and legacies in India and Africa.
She has published in the South African Historical Journal, African Studies, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler História, Ecologie & Politique, and Public Culture, and is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson (UNISA, 2010). Her monograph entitled The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India was published in 2014 by Manchester University Press.
2015
Danai Mupotsa is Lecturer in African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand. Her research is oriented towards reading everyday intimacies. Her undisciplined intellectual training has at its messy foundations a commitment to feminist, queer and antiracist political and pedagogical praxis. Danai undutifully attends to theories of affect, psychoanalysis, materialisms, space/temporalities and difference.
Her writings and teaching reflect her interest in desire, intimacy, feeling and the relation between these to visual/oral/aural and textual cultures, objects, ritual and space. She published amongst other texts ‘Sex, Money, Power: Considerations for African Women’s Empowerment’ (At Issue, February 2008) and ‘From Family to Nation: Researching Gender & Sexuality’ (in Cramer, Christopher; Hammond, Laura & Pottier, Johan (Eds). Navigating the Terrains of Methods and Ethics in Conflict Research. Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Abdourahmane Idrissa currently teaches international cooperation at the University of Niamey and runs a research and training program at a social sciences reserch center there. His research focuses on the political economy of democratization, political Islam and the problems of the integration processes in the West African region. He has recently published, with Samuel Decalo, a completely new edition of The Historical Dictionary of Niger.
He obtained his doctorate in Political Science from the University of Florida in 2003. His doctorate examines the relations between the francophone elite in Niger and other social groups (including the West African Muslim community) and their alternative visions of political and social order – and the way alternative notions of legitimacy and social order have gathered force in the context of democratizing efforts within a much-weakened state.
Kristin Peterson is Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine’s Department of Anthropology. Her research and writing are concerned with theories of capital and property; “popular” economies, trade, and markets; health, science, and medicine studies; and postcolonial theory. She is especially interested in bringing medical anthropology and science and technology studies in conversation with African Studies and postcolonial iterations of political economy.
Her first book, Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2014), describes a once thriving brand name pharmaceutical market in Nigeria that transformed into one of the world’s worst fake (and inefficacious) drug problems. Drawing on the stories and lives of industry executives, pharmaceutical market traders, industry and academic pharmacists, drug marketers, narcotics traders, and regulatory officials, she describes the making of drug chemistries and market dynamics in the aftermath of 1980s liberalization. She particularly focuses on the intertwined nature of pharmaceutical industry speculation and speculative practices found in Nigerian drug markets.
Amy Niang is originally from Senegal, and is now a Lecturer in International Relations at University of Witwatersrand. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and an MA in Political Economy from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her dissertation examined state and social processes in the Voltaic region of West Africa between the 16th and 19th Centuries and her current project examines the history of the “international” as a concept and a normative field.
Christopher J. Lee is a Research Associate at WiSER. He previously taught in the United States and Canada at Stanford, Harvard, and Dalhousie Universities and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in African history from Stanford University. Trained as a socio-cultural historian, his teaching and research interests concern the social, political, and intellectual histories of southern Africa. His recent work has addressed decolonization and the politics of the Indian Ocean during the Cold War. He has conducted field and archival work in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Great Britain, Italy, Indonesia, the West Bank, and the United States, in addition to living and working in Botswana and Mozambique. He first came to Africa at the age of sixteen when he received a scholarship to study at the American University in Cairo.
He is the editor of Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010). He has two books appearing in 2014, Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives and the Genealogical Imagination with Duke University Press and Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism with Ohio University Press.
2014
John M. Janzen is Professor Emeritus of Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the The University of Kansas. He is author of The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (1978), Mennonite Furniture: A Migrant Tradition 1766-1910 (1991), The Social Fabric of Health: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology (2001), Manual & Test Bank. Companion to The Social Fabric of Health (2002) and co-authoring Medical Anthropology in Global Africa (2014).
John M. Janzen researches and writes on the socio-cultural dimensions of African health and healing, and theoretical issues in medical anthropology. Currently he works with other scholars on postwar trauma healing in African conflicts and on therapies and restorative social arrangements within African diaspora communities in the United States. He directs the Center’s project on Identity, Voice, and Community: New African Immigrants in Kansas sponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council. Since 1998 he has directed of the Kansas_African_Studies_Center at the University of Kansas.
2013
Andrew Barry is Professor of Political Geography and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. He is author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (2001), Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (2013) and co-editor of Foucault and Political Reason (1996), The Technological Economy (2005) and Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (2013).
Andrew Barry was originally trained in Natural Sciences and the History and Philosophy of Science, but his recent work crosses the boundaries between political geography and anthropology, social theory and Science and Technology Studies. His current research interests include the politics of energy resources and infrastructures, and the relations between Sciences and Technology Studies and anthropological theory. He has carried out fieldwork in Western Europe, North America and the South Caucasus.
2012
Helen Verran is professor of the history and philosophy of science and works as a senior researcher in a project on transdisciplinary research and indigenous knowledge systems at Charles Darwin University. Helen Verran is particularly interested in philosophical aspects of liaising disparate knowledge traditions and the relationship of epistemological and governmental techniques. In Halle she gave a talk on the past and present of social studies of numbers and speculated about future ontologically focused investigations, meaning studies that unravel the ontic saliences of numbers and show their ordering effects.
Amy Field Craven is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology of New York University. Her dissertation research – “Bauernhöfe statt Agrarfabriken” – investigates the development of animal- and environmentally-friendly husbandry practices, their relationship with protection laws and regulations, and working as transformative agents of rural livelihoods in Germany.
Theodore Porter is professor at the Department of History of the University of California (Los Angeles). He is the author of The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986), Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995), and Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004). As a historian of science he worked on objectifying practices and the history of quantification. In his extensive work on statistics he historically traces the emergence of technologies of standardized calculative reasoning, and the growing importance of such technologies for political rule. Understanding statistical techniques as a response to a political culture of distrusting experts and elites, he shows us how statal administration and procedures of political decision making became ever more entwined with scientific numerical demonstrations.
2011
Marko Monteiro is professor at the Institute of Geosciences of Campinas State University. He is an anthropologist of science and technology being particularly interested in the work of visualization. More recently he has done research on the production of scientific evidence in medicine, by analyzing the interaction between scientists and digital images. His current ethnographic project engages with politics and remote sensing practices in Brazil. It tries to better understand the interrelations between technologically mediated forest reconnaissance, policies of resource governance and concerning matters like deforestation.
Uli Beisel holds a PhD in Human Geography. Her previous research was concerned with malaria control in Ghana, looking at health politics, the social ecology of malaria, and the complexities of mosquito-parasite-human interactions.
Anne Fleckstein is a PhD Candidate at the Graduiertenkolleg Mediale Historiographien of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her PhD project “Establishing as complete a picture as possible” is concerned with performativity, mediality and the constitution of “truth” in the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
Satyel Larson is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Rhetoric of the University of California (Berkeley) finalizing her dissertation Bearing Knowledge: Law, Reproduction and the Female Body in Modern Morocco, 1912-Present. By analyzing the protracted pregnancies known throughout the Maghreb as ‘the sleeping baby in the mother’s womb,’ this dissertation challenges assumptions of a natural reproductive body in liberal feminist theories of law and medicine to offer a new account of the relationship between historical modes of reproductive expertise and the performance and regulation of the female reproductive body.
Amade M’charek is associate professor at the department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam where she acts as the co-director of the research program group Health, Care and the Body. Her focus of research is particularly on genetic diversity, population genetics and forensic DNA practices. Her interest is in the ir/relevance of race in such practice, the ways in which race is enacted in them, and the relation that is established between the individual and the collective. She has published on these topics, e.g. The Human Genome Diversity Project: An ethnography of scientific practice (2005, Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on a project called “Dutchness in Genes and Genealogy” a project on technologies of belonging and the collaborations between geneticists, archaeologists and genealogists.
Andreas Eckert is professor at the unit of African Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin. In January he gave a presentation about “How does one write a history of Africa since 1850?”.
2010
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Professor of Anthropology at Carleton College (USA), is spending her 2010-11 sabbatical conducting fieldwork on ways African migrants to Europe manage the complications of belonging and exclusion through their childbearing and childrearing strategies. Extending prior research on rural-to-urban Bamiléké women migrants’ social networks and reproductive decisions in Cameroon, it studies how Bamiléké migrants to Berlin use childbearing to affect the ways they and their children belong to families, to cultural communities, and to countries.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg is also spending this year with the LOST group, and with the Arbeitskreis Medical Anthropology at the Free University-Berlin. She is participating in the LOST weekly colloquium, and will present papers both at the MPI seminar and at the LOST weekly colloquium.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg received her PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 1990. Her research develops the concept of “reproductive insecurity,” focusing on fertility/infertility, gender, social networks, and rumor in the context of an intensifying politics of belonging. She investigates these issues across time, through investigations of collective memory, and across space, through comparing domestic and transnational diasporas. In December 2010, she gave a talk on “Birth and Belonging in an African Diaspora”.
Johanna Crane is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington-Bothell and a Stetten Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. She spent two months with the LOST group in June and July of 2010. She attended the Conference on “Bodies and Bodiliness in Africa” in Moshi, Tanzania, where she presented the paper, “Doing Global Health: The Value of Bodies in Place.” She also participated in the LOST weekly colloquium, where she presented the paper “Scrambling for Africa? AIDS and the Rise of Global Health Partnerships in the American Academy.” In July 2010, she presented the paper “The Politics of Participation” at an MPI seminar.
Johanna Crane received her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California San Francisco/Berkeley in 2007. Her research interests include HIV/AIDS in the United States and Uganda, biomedical science in postcolonial settings, and science and social inequality.
Amade M’charek is associate professor at the department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. In July she presented a paper called „The HeLa Error: On the aesthetics of wholeness and the materiality of race“.
2009
Manjari Mahajan, a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in the United States, spent three weeks with the LOST group in June 2009. While at the Max Planck Institute, she presented a paper titled “Evacuating the Public Out of Citizenship” at the LOST conference on “Governance and Biomedicine in Africa”. She additionally presented the papers “Governing through the Non-Governmental: Shifting Terrains of Public Health in India” and “Designing Epidemics: Models, Policymaking, and Global Foreknowledge in Indias AIDS Crisis” at MPI seminars.
Manjari Mahajan’s research interests include science and technology studies, public health, law, and humanitarian emergencies. In particular, she is interested in the politics of knowledge that underlie shifts in the conceptualization of public health. Her dissertation work focused on the politics and sociology of the AIDS epidemics in India and South Africa. She earned her doctorate from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in June 2008, and holds a Masters from the Science Policy Research Institute (SPRU) at Sussex University, and a B.A. from Harvard University.
2008
Noa Vaisman, a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago spent almost a month (November-December 2008) with the LOST group where she was exploring avenues for a new research topic. The project she is developing centers on the complicated relations between conceptions of the body and the psyche in sites of pharmaceutical drug trials in South Africa. Specifically, how do pharmaceutical companies and their representatives negotiate and articulate different and sometimes contradicting understandings of the relations between the body and the psyche in test trials of psychiatric medicine. What conceptions of the psyche and its “functioning” are embedded in these test trials and how are they negotiated and reshaped in and through the interchange with local explanations and treatment of different states of the psyche. Dr. Vaisman also participated in the theory reading group discussions and was a commentator in the bi-weekly research colloquium of Prof. Rottenburg.
Sheila Jasanoff, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University gave a lecture on “Making Objectivity in Regulatory Science: Sites and Practices” (18th June 2008).
2007
Susan Reynolds Whyte from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen gave a lecture on “Revealing the Hidden: HIV testing and divination compared” (3rd July 2007).
Steven Robins from the Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch gave a lecture on “From ‘Rights’ to ‘Ritual’: AIDS activism in South Africa” (13th June 2007). He was a DAAD guest professor at the MLU on the initiative of the LOST Group for the summer semester April to July 2007.
Lauren Muller from the University of Stellenbosch spent 4 months (April to July 2007) to work on a journal article and doctoral chapters on the role of technology and discourse to produce the emergent field of global mental health.
Jessica Mesman from the Department of Technology & Society Studies, University of Maastricht was invited to join a workshop on Science and Technology Studies (7th June 2007).
Viola Hörbst from the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Munich was invited to join a workshop on Science and Technology Studies (7th June 2007).
2004
Sheila Jasanoff from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University gave a lecture on “Biotechnology and Empire: Reflections on science and political culture” (6th July 2004).