Leipzig University is a widely recognized hub for innovative research in the field of globalisation and transregional studies. The Institute of Social- and Cultural Anthropology significantly contributes to this field of research by offering leading studies in anthropology and investments in future oriented research. Our publications include topics such as technology, environments, entrepreneurship, memory and health. We place considerable focus on research related to the anthropology of globalization.
Current research projects
Research at the Institute of Anthropology currently focuses on politics and governance in relation to digitisation, social justice and inclusion, as well as experiences of environments and wellbeing. With our research, we strive for empirically rich theoretical work and a profound understanding of how current political imaginations and utopias shape and enact the future.
Racialization, difference and inequality in science and politics
How did racism shape, and was shaped by, categories of human difference? How have categories of difference, like “race”, “caste”, or “ethnicity”, been co-constituted through racializing and (biologically or culturally) essentializing approaches in science? And how could sciences that deal with the study of human diversity, particularly anthropology, break free from the legacy of scientific racism? This projects explores these questions through an ethnographic examination of the history of racial anthropology and its legacies today, both in Germany and India.
A focal point of the historical examination is the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, in Berlin, where not only German but also many international anthropologists, including some from India, worked and also where many human remains from colonized territories were used for research. By looking at these transnational and transcolonial connections in racial sciences, the project also discusses international scientific dependencies and sovereignty and post-colonial science. The project’s goal is to contribute to the assessment of the legacies of racism and to the decolonization of anthropology and other sciences dealing with human diversity.
Further information: Thiago Pinto Barbosa
Being-in-Work - Labor, precarity and living with disability in the Global South
In collaboration with researchers in the fields of disability studies, disability anthropology and organization studies, the project explores the relationship between work and disability. We examine the category of work in contexts of the Global South, where income opportunities are scarce, and from the perspective of people with disabilities. On the one hand, we highlight the commodification of disability in new development discourses and inclusive social enterprises that build new business models around "special skills" to benefit disabled workers. On the other hand, we reveal how people with disabilities or chronic illnesses inhabit work as a way of life and a way of being. The desire to "work normally" and the anchoring in work points to a problematic gap in discourse-critical debates on disability, capitalism and labor. Here, the realm of work/labor runs the risk of being examined solely in terms of its exclusionary potential.
Our project uses biographical interviews, participant observation and autoethnographic approaches to show how individuals with disabilities see themselves as working people in different local contexts, and how they actively occupy individual facets of a normative world of work. In conversation with the anthropology of work alongside the emerging field of disability anthropology, our project starts with the premise of understanding work - beyond structural aspects - as experience. The elasticity and complexity of work as an activity makes it possible to become involved in work in a processual, situational and imaginative way and to demand social affiliation through this anchoring.
Contact: Stefanie Mauksch
Output:
- Thyssen-sponsored workshop in July 2026: Disabled Bodies at Work:
Utopias for Work Worlds yet to Come; Mauksch, Stefanie (Universität
Leipzig), Michele Friedner (University of Chicago, USA), Giorgio Brocco
(Universität Wien, Österreich) und Dilshan Fernando (Universität Guelph,
Canada) - Mauksch, Stefanie & Giorgio Brocco (Forthcoming). Being in Work: Work as Experience, Circumstantial Disablement and the Desire to Work as Normal. Current Anthropology.
- Mauksch, Stefanie & Giorgio Brocco. Being in/at Work: Repositioning Knowledge about Work, Disability and Chronicity. Special Issue of Anthropology of Work Review. Scheduled for early 2025.
- Mauksch, Stefanie & Pascal Dey (2024). "Treating disability as an asset (not a limitation): A critical examination of disability inclusion through social entrepreneurship." Organization 31.4: 624-644.
- Mauksch, Stefanie (2023). Being blind, being exceptional: work integration, social entrepreneurship and the reimagination of blind potential in Nepal. Disability & Society 38.3: 401-420.
Environ-mental health: Experience, Ethics and Poiesis of Ecological Grief Amid Wounded Environments India (ENVIRON-MENTAL)
This project investigates “environ-mental health” in India and beyond, using the lens of ecological grief. Expanding mental ill health beyond individual pathology, this project situates suffering at the intersection of ecological, individual, and collective wounding. Treating the Anthropocene fundamentally as a time of mourning, this project traces the experience, ethics, and politics of ecological grief amid wounded environments and probes grief’s generative potential for practices of repair. Here, “ecological grief” is understood as the affective response to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss. It can be seen as something that requires repair but also a form of repair in itself. Reparative action emerging out of ecological grief becomes a method of environ-mental repair, even as mental pathologies situated in wounded environments are being repaired in clinical contexts that also link psychological to environmental suffering. The objectives of the project are (a) to understand ecological grief as it is experienced, articulated and mobilized in the context of environmental damage, loss, and climate change in India and beyond (b) to describe how ecological grief becomes both generative of, as well as needing repair in different contexts such as the everyday, the clinic, or environmental activism; and (c) to test the concept of environ-mental health. As response to conditions and impetus for action, both collective and intensely personal experiences of grief are often attached to particular places. This project focuses, first, on knowing, experiencing and sensing environmental damage and loss. Second, it focuses on the poiesis or the generative and transformative work of ecological grief.
Project duration: 01 Jan 2026 - 31 Dec 2026
Funded by: DFG
Contact: Claudia Lang
Toward an Anthropology of Chance
Susann Ludwig introduces her research project:
"Chance shapes the process and the outcomes of scientific research. However, when writing up results, elements of chance tend to become mere anecdotes and illustrations. Chance escapes familiar ways of accounting for research results. We know that chance counts and I want to show how chance counts. I am curious about the relationship between chance and science. So, in this project, I put chance at the center; it is the object of my research. The leading question is this: How do scientists engage with chance, and how does this interaction shape their understanding?
I anchor chance in moments of understanding both in individual research processes and in interdisciplinary research. Particularly, in collaborations between the natural and social sciences, understanding is continuously contested rather than assumed. Aha-moments are key to understanding and ultimately, to the success of these collective endeavors. Against this backdrop, I examine: How do scientists interact with and respond to chance in their everyday activities, both within and outside the formal contexts of scientific research? In what ways does chance contribute to understanding, and how does it shape both individual researchers and collaborative research efforts?
This project contributes to anthropology by placing chance at the forefront, establishing connections with existing works and debates on uncertainty and knowledge production. It experiments with and, thus, expands the anthropological method by incorporating it throughout the entire research process."
Contact: Susann Ludwig
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.
The research group LinC is under the supervision of Andrea Behrends.
Get to know more about Andrea Behrends on her profile.
Completed Research Projects
Digital Governance and the Respatialisation of the Indian State
This subproject examines the role of spatial entrepreneurs in the spatial consequences of establishing a digital administrative structure in India. By comparing three perspectives on the planning, implementation, and appropriation of digitized administration, the subproject systematically describes the transformation of the nation-state as a spatial format, thereby creating a theoretical understanding of the hitherto little-studied spatialization effects of current digital infrastructure projects.
- Funding Agency:
DFG (Subproject of the Collaborative Research Center “Spatialization Processes under Conditions of Globalization”) - Duration:
2020 – 2023 - Project Management:
Ursula Rao
The Reconfiguration of Mental Health in the Context of Digitisation
Mental health and psy-discourses are increasingly migrating to the digital medium. Although the digitisation as a part of neoliberal psychopolitics is becoming increasingly important for (self-)care and coping with mental difficulties, there has been little medical anthropological research on it so far. This project investigates the reconfiguration of health and (self-)care under digital conditions. The study focuses on new digital technologies for coping with mental difficulties and on the discursive constructions of health-related effects of digital living environments on (mental) health and well-being. What effects does the use of new technologies have on the way people organize their everyday life and meet mental challenge stoday? Which new human-technology relationships emerge? Which visionary ethical and political projects are surfacing and which dystopian narratives shape local worlds and lead to political action?
- Funding Agency:
DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - Duration:
2019 – 2024 - Project Management:
Claudia Lang
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia through Adopting, Orchestrating and Cooperating
Investment in new infrastructures contributes significantly to the current rapid transformation of Asia. This thematic line of the Shaping Asia networking initiative studies the recursive processes by which new investments shape the social texture of Asian societies and visa-versa. We propose comparison as an ideal tool to map contrasts and similarities across different countries and understand the role of inner-Asian relations. We organise the analysis around three key experiences as part of implementing large-scale projects: adaptation, orchestration and cooperation. The three focus areas consider (1) the way new digital systems for the management of population are situationally adapted to different localities in Asia, (2) the streamlining effects of global engineering solutions for costal protection in South and South East Asia, and (3) the character of international collaboration in trans-border infrastructure projects. A core group of participating scholars has been chosen for their expertise in the relevant fields. This project will develop innovative methods for in-depth comparison and help to understand the relation between new infrastructures, political cultures, trans-regional connections and cooperation. Through interactions with the other members of the Shaping Asia networking initiative and during consultation with further experts, this project will contribute to a better understanding of the processes by which Asian futures are being produced.
- Funding Agency:
DFG (Subproject of the Network "Shaping Asia. Connectivities, Comparisons, Collaborations") - Duration:
2020 – 2022 - Project Management:
Ursula Rao
Dealing with the Violent Past in Somalia: The Case of Forensic Anthropological Interventions in Somaliland and its Implications Beyond the Local Context
This research focuses on recent initiatives to excavate mass graves in internationally unrecognized Republic of Somaliland (northwestern Somalia). It explores how local people understand and react to forensic anthropological interventions, how these interventions take place and whose interests are involved. The project understands the initiatives to shed light on past atrocities with the help of forensics as part of a “global accountability regime”. One important research question is how the understanding of truth and accountability advanced by forensic anthropologists and supported by international human rights lawyers relates to (or is conflicting with) more local understandings of (proper) death and justice. Besides, the project addresses also the more practical questions: What can be learned from the ongoing forensic intervention in Somaliland for the rest of Somalia concerning dealing with the past? What is the relevance of forensic anthropology in general with regard to (post-)conflict settings in the global south, and particular with regard to Sunni Muslim contexts?
- Funding Agencies:
2019 – 2020: London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) under the Award CRP Fellowship
2015 – 2018: Daimler and Benz Foundation (Project: 32-06/14) - Duration:
2015 – 2020 - Projekt Management:
Markus Höhne