Our professorships in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Overview of our organizational units.
Science and Technology Studies des Globalen Südens
JP Dr. Jia Hui Lee
Social Anthropology - Prof. Dr. Erdmute Alber
The chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth is a dynamic and cooperative research community under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Erdmute Alber. We share research interests and knowhow in theoretical frameworks as kinship, generations, gender, age and life as well as in ethnographic themes which range from care, class and migration up to pandemics, work and education.
Social and Cultural Anthropology - Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm
Our research, pedagogy and engagement focus on the empirical inquiries and sharing of knowledge produced through critical analyses of categories of differences and their political implications. We investigate how dynamics of knowledge production and communication relate to questions of (in)equality and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Social movements, migration and border regimes, biosocial and economic justice, forms of racialization, and (trans)national politics of belonging count among our diversified empirical fields
Social and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Africa
Prof. Dr. Sandra Calkins
In this research field, 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, 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.
Social and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Social Belonging JP Dr. Melina C. Kalfelis
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.