Research Focus Areas

• Care
• State
• Kinship
• African Post-Socialism
• Reproduction

Short Biography

Nina Haberland is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, where they worked as University Assistant (Predoc) between 2017 and 2021. After studying Social & Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, they worked as Research Assistant in the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded project ‘Inner family resource flows and intergenerational relationships in West Africa’ (2015–16). Nina’s research interests include negotiations of care at the intersection of state and family, the continuities of African post-socialism, and kinship studies.

Dissertation Project

Through the lens of care: Encountering the state in post-socialist Tanzania

Supervisor: Tatjana Thelen

Based on 12 months of ethnographic research, this project focuses on the encounters between state agents and citizens in a public hospital and social welfare office in Northern Tanzania. As street-level bureaucrats, nurses and welfare officers play a central role in people’s perception and understanding of ‘the’ state as they negotiate ideas of care responsibilities, (un)deservingness, and moralities in their daily interactions with patients, patients’ relatives, or welfare clients. These negotiations are characterized by certain ideas of what the state is and, more importantly, how the state is supposed to care for its citizens. Considering the country’s past, this project argues that the relationship between citizens and the state is crucially informed by the continuities of Tanzania’s socialist period Ujamaa.

All Publications