Dr. Amiel Bize Melnick

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Cultural and Social Social Anthropology

Scientific career

• 2018: Ph.D. Anthropology, Columbia University, "Black Spots: Roads and Risk in Rural Kenya"  
• 2003: B.A. Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Work Experience

• since April 2018: senior research associate in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm, University of Bayreuth)
  
• Sep. 2016 - Mar. 2018: research associate, ASL department (architecture, urban and landscape planning), Universität Kassel
• 2010-2016: PhD Fellow, Anthropology Department, Columbia University  
• 2007-2010: PhD Fellow, Anthropology Department, Graduate Center CUNY

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Cultural and Social Social Anthropology

Research Focus

My research focuses on social and economic transformations at capitalist margins. My current book project examines risk and “post-agrarian” rural life in East Africa, where decades of austerity have produced new configurations of value and social life.

Examining the entangled and shifting roles of road, land, and forest as sources of value for rural residents, the project demonstrates new configurations of rural life in the face of speculative accumulation, the celebration of entrepreneurial risk-taking, and a general rural abandonment.

Two new projects extend these themes in different directions. First, research on climate-sensitive pastoralist insurance examines the imbrication of development and financialization, while also considering the complexities of both pastoralists and “the environment” as objects of knowledge and governance that have historically been difficult to apprehend within national-territorial and capitalist frames. Second, an investigation of gleaning - an ancient form of redistribution, organized around harvest leftovers - considers the ongoing significance of the concept of remainder in moral-economic life.

I also have ongoing interests around roads and road accidents, scrap metal salvage, and storage infrastructure.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Cultural and Social Social Anthropology

Publications

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Cultural and Social Social Anthropology

Dr. Amiel Bize Melnick
Senior research associate

University of Bayreuth
Building: GW II
Room: 00.21
Universitätsstraße 30
​D-95447 Bayreuth

Phone:
E-mail: amiel.bize@uni-bayreuth.de
Homepage: Anthropology | Universität Bayreuth