Monthly Archives: October 2017

I am going to Paris: Fernand Braudel Associate Directorship

In 2018, I will spend one month as Associate Research Director (Directeur d’Études Associés) at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH) in Paris.

The Fernand Braudel Associate Directorship is an international mobility programme at Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris (FMSH) (for more information see here). It has been created in 1975 upon the initiative of Fernand Braudel.

During my stay, I will give lectures at the Collège de France (EHESS/CNRS), the Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques (CETOBAC), and the Centre d’Étude des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS-IMM) while continuing to write my book on ethno-religious communities in Myanmar’s former capital Yangon. Ideally, I will just have returned from follow-up research in Myanmar, with fresh insights from the field.

Thanks to Prof. Stéphane Dudoignon, Dr. Yazid Ben Hounet and Prof. Baudouin Dupret for supporting my application!

 

Research Granted: How to become an activist in Myanmar and South Africa

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted 4 PhD positions at the University of Konstanz for a joint comparative research project on “Activist becomings in South Africa and Myanmar.“ I will supervise 2 PhD projects on Myanmar while my colleague, Thomas Kirsch, will supervise two projects on South Africa. We hope that the outcomes will provide new knowledge concerning practices of democratic participation in the midst of urban and postcolonial crisis.

The project is definitely a precious contribute to the infrastructural turn and could serve as a model of research in very different parts of the world and in different social and political circumstances (anonymous reviewer)

With a focus on material and non-material infrastructure, our project seeks to provide new theoretical and methodological tools to study political formations, thereby contributing to an anthropology of activism, infrastructural studies, political anthropology, anthropology of democracy and African and Asian studies. The research project explicitly seeks to disseminate knowledge and build bridges between scholarly research and activism – something I am really excited about!