The Lifeworlds in Crisis (LinC) Study Group puts a focus on research about issues like migration, political activism, resource extraction, revolution and its aftermath, vigilante regimes, infrastructures, digital entrepreneurship and gender/feminist studies in African contexts and beyond.
Our research interest
By looking at people’s lives during short or extended periods of emergency, hardship or general uncertainty that occur in all parts of the world and on varying scales, the projects in our group go beyond the exclusion of modalities of continued everyday living during exceptional times. Instead, we look at the ways social relations are maintained to lay the focus on manifold forms of everyday practices and navigating through such times by gathering situationally relevant knowledge and negotiations of sameness and difference with others who are also living through intense times. We study how practice and knowledge interrelate with systems of unequal relations and follow how acquiring, applying and adapting such knowledge occurs also between humans and more-than-humans.
PhD student members
About Saskia Jaschek
Saskia is a PhD candidate at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth. Their research interests include the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution, street protests and other forms of resistance, political subjectivities, political feelings and affects within social movements. Saskia also works as a freelance journalist with a focus on Sudan.
About the project
The PhD project „Time of Disappointment“ deals with Sudan’s revolutionary movement and their resistance to the coup d’état carried out by the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on October 25, 2021. Focusing on the revolutionary movement on the street, the project ethnographically analyzes the street protests and related resistance practices, as well as their trajectory from the day of the coup until the signing of a framework agreement between military and civilian representatives in December 2022.
Drawing on the theory of affect, atmospheres and New Materialism, the project examines the atmospheric conditions of a coup d’état, how these affected the revolutionaries and practices of street resistance, and how they changed over time. In this regard, it also traces the atmospheric shifts post-coup, ending in the outbreak of war in April 2023.
Shahar Livne
About Shahar Livne
Shahar is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the School of Public Health and the Tamar Golan African Studies Center at Ben Gurion University (BGU) in Israel. Her doctoral research examines the nexus between extreme weather events, health, and food insecurity using mixed-methods approaches, with a particular focus on understanding climate change experiences within communities and health services in rural Malawi. Since 2020, she has conducted fieldwork in Malawi through a collaborative partnership with Partners in Health/Abwenzi Pa Za Umoyo (PIH/APZU) in Southern Malawi, examining how cycles of extreme weather events shape the lived experiences of rural communities and healthcare providers.
Shahar holds a bachelor's degree in History and in African Studies and a master's degree in Emergency and Disaster Management from BGU, both earned with exceptional distinction. Her research interests encompass health system transitions and adaptive capacity in resource-constrained rural environments, critical disaster discourse, and the human dimensions of environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on health policy implications and implementation.
Read more about Sahar Livne. Find her published works here. You can find her contact details here.
About the Project
The project "Severe Climate Events and Health: The Experiences of Climate Change in Communities and Health Services in Malawi" explores the impact of severe weather events on rural communities and healthcare systems from an anthropological perspective. While climate change research has traditionally focused on natural science approaches, this project explores the social and cultural dimensions of climate change in Malawi. Following the devastating climate events such as Cyclones Idai, Ana, and Freddy, along with an escalating pattern of droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks in the region, the study investigates how these recurring crises shape community experiences and healthcare delivery in Malawi. Using multi-sited ethnographic methods including participant observation, interviews, surveys and document review, the project examines how rural communities and health and welfare providers understand and respond to climate-related risks and the opportunities that arise during recovery and rebuilding efforts. By focusing on the intersection between health services and climate-affected communities, this study provides critical insights into the lived experiences of climate change in one of the world's most climate-vulnerable regions.
The study is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (#2027/22, PI: Prof. Anat Rosenthal).
Teresa Cremer
About Teresa Cremer
Teresa Cremer is a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology within the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Research Group Sand: The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean. Her PhD project explores the material, political and social life of sand along Kenya’s coast, focusing on how sand is extracted, circulated, valued and contested in and around Mombasa. By tracing how sediment moves through sand mines, livelihoods, eroding beaches and coastal infrastructures, her research examines how sand shapes - and is shaped by - everyday practices, urban imaginaries, and coastal futures. In doing so, it challenges extractivist understandings of sand and dominant development logics.
Teresa holds BA and MA degrees in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Cologne, where she also worked with the Emmy Noether Research Group DELTA - Volatile Waters and the Hydrosocial Anthropocene in Major River Deltas.
Her Master’s thesis, based on ethnographic fieldwork during Cape Town’s 2018 water crisis, was published in the Kölner Ethnologische Beiträge and received the University of Cologne’s MA thesis award. Her follow-up essay ‘Crises, downside up’, won the VAD Prize for the best essay on African politics for 2020. Alongside her academic work, Teresa engages with multimodal ethnographic methods, with an interest in filmmaking, photography and storytelling, to explore alternative forms of knowledge production.
About the project: Grains of Power: Sand, Urban Transformation, and Coastal Futures in Mombasa, Kenya
This project explores the multiple values, uses and meanings attached to sand in Mombasa, a rapidly transforming city on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. Anchored at the intersection of urban anthropology, materiality studies, and coastal heritage, the study examines how sand’s extraction and circulation shape the city's evolving urban and environmental landscape. By tracing the movement of sand—from sand quarries to construction sites, urban planning offices, and eroding beaches—the project investigates how this granular material mediates experiences of urban belonging, spatial inequality, and environmental justice in a context shaped by colonial legacies, urbanization and climate crisis.
Through ethnographic research, the project examines how sand is extracted, moved, valued, and contested, and how it acquires meaning as it circulates through the city, people’s homes, seawalls, livelihoods and coastal economies. Sand, the project argues, is a strategic and contested matter whose flows link people, transform the city’s shoreline and shape social dynamics. As modern construction threatens to overshadow Swahili architecture, local building practices, and livelihoods, this research will seek to understand how shifting materialities – especially of sand – informs not just construction, but the very social, cultural, and ecological fabric of Mombasa.
Find out more about the team behind the project here and learn more about the SAND project itself on this website.
Postdoc-Members
About Enrico Ille
Enrico Ille is Academic Staff Member at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University. He worked as Consultant Researcher on gold mining in Rift Valley Institute's X-Border project and as Postdoctoral Researcher in the DFID-funded project "The urban land nexus and inclusive urbanisation in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and Khartoum" of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, University of Sussex). He was previously Urgent Anthropology Fellow for the British Museum and the Royal Anthropological Institute with a project on socio-ecological history of Kerma in northern Sudan. He currently writes his habilitation on political ecology in/of Sudan and co-chairs the working group "Plants and politics" at the LeipzigLab.
Find his research profile here.
Enrico Ille about his project
"The aim of my habilitation project is to develop a long-term view on interconnected conflicts over resources in Sudan into a multiscalar, intersectional analysis that can show how macro-political dynamics and concerns translate into location-specific (‘local’) political interactions and vice-versa. My subsequent in-depth and longue durée study of gold mining through the lense of resource conflicts is not just intended as contribution to regional political history. Apart from its tremendous implications for questions about the conditions under which political change can take place in the region, the focus on extractive governance keeps observations necessarily linked on several scales, e.g. the radicalization of conflicts in several areas pushed by the distributional injustice resulting from centralized distribution of land property and mineral revenues informed by an extraversion-oriented political economy.
While many of these aspects appear as ‘classical’ resource conflicts, summarized in such conventional terms as resource curse, cycle of poverty or proletarisation, the multiscalar, intersectional view on economic, political and location-specific ecological observations promises to yield insights into political processes of negotiation and transformation between the broad lines, so much, indeed, that occurring apparently radical changes – such as the largely unpredicted December revolution of 2018/2019 – can be qualified concerning their structural resilience and local relevance. Different from layered concepts of scale, however, I endeavour to engage with concepts, such as translation, that allow concomitantly for continuity and 'leap-frogging', intent and serendipity, routine and improvisation, while benefitting from the rich debates on knowledge, labour and human-nature relations that go beyond a purely instrumental understanding of resources."