Research

Social anthropological research in Bayreuth takes many different forms - each of the professorships has its own profile. At the same time, the research interests of the individual professorships overlap in terms of content, regional preference, and specific fields.

Two topics of great interest across the board at the moment are political anthropology and the study of the structures of non-industrial societies.

The place where the greatest number of these areas of interest intersect geographically is in Africa.

running projects

My research and teaching are situated at the intersection of social, political, and visual anthropology, and I specialize in phenomenological approaches. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in West Africa and Western Europe, I am currently building a chair that investigates ordinary lifeworlds and practices of violence, crime, and belonging in contexts shaped by histories of global inequality. I am particularly interested in questions on ethics, governance, media, gender, and dynamics of (dis)trust in conflict settings and how these transgress and link intimate, political, and transnational domains of everyday life.

Melina C. Kalfelis

In the research field "SCA with a focus on Africa", we analyze contemporary economic-ecological fault lines with a special focus on African contexts, because these bring central political and moral questions of our time into sharp relief. We investigate how knowledges about the environment and the economy emerge, circulate, are brought together, contradict themselves, are contested, politicized and shape the futures of health and wellbeing for human and more-than-human lives. In the light of historical inequalities and the geopolitical dominance of Western knowledge systems, our approach to knowledge-making is deliberately broad and attuned to building resources, collaboratively with scholars from the continent, to expand societal horizons of imagination beyond narrow ambitions of economic growth. Our research and teaching explore the intersections of economic anthropology, environmental anthropology/environmental humanities and postcolonial science and technology studies (STS) with an emphasis on African contexts and their global entanglements.

Sandra Calkins

Wir teilen Forschungsinteressen und Expertise in theoretischen Bereichen wie Verwandtschaft, Generationen, Geschlecht, Alter und Lebenslauf, sowie ethnographische Themen, die von Pflege, Klasse und Migration bis hin zu Pandemien, Arbeit und Bildung reichen. Unsere Forschungen erstrecken sich über den gesamten Globus, von Amerika über Europa bis nach Afrika, mit einer einzigartigen Konzentration von Fachwissen auf Westafrika. Wir widmen uns der historisch fundierten, auf Feldforschung basierenden Forschung und der Erstellung ethnografisch fundierter Analysen zu aktuellen Themen. Dabei schenken wir den vielfältigen Formen, in denen soziale Beziehungen den sozialen Wandel vorantreiben, besondere Aufmerksamkeit.

Erdmute Alber

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