Since the new material turn, infrastructures have attracted increasing attention in various fields of the social sciences and humanities. Despite their apparent context-free objective and timeless logic, historical development and temporality matter in how infrastructures are appropriated and what meanings get attached to them. Thereby infrastructures do not only feed into local practices of appropriation but also into imaginations as well as the formation of new socialities or differentiation, producing in- and exclusion. The 4th Ethnography Lab will focus on imagination and materiality of infrastructures as processes of appropriation, translation and decline in contexts spanning different historical times and geographical spaces.
The laboratory’s goal is to provide a forum for intensive interdisciplinary discussions of young scholars’ ongoing or recently completed research. It offers to a selected group of advanced PhD students and young post-doctoral scholars the opportunity to discuss their work with two distinguished guest scholars and present their findings and ideas at an inter-disciplinary forum.
The Ethnography-Lab is organised by the Departments of Cultural and Social Anthropology and African Studies and co-funded by the research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies and the FWF-project Employment-tied housing in (post)colonial Africa.
Organisers
Prof. Tatjana Thelen (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology)
Prof. Kirsten Rüther (Department of African Studies)
Prof. Peter Schweitzer (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology)
Guest Scholars
Jörg Niewöhner, Professor for Urban Anthropology and Human-Environment Relations at the Institute for European Ethnology (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Antina von Schnitzler, Associate Professor of International Affairs (The New School, NY)
