The projects in this field of research examine activism as a meaningful socio-cultural practice that is strongly rooted in local contexts and at the same time highly mobile, thus cutting across national borders and societal boundaries. They are interested in socio-political efforts to alter the world at different scales and to different effects, some of them having the form of informal sporadic responses, others finding expression in organised volunteer work or advocacy efforts.
How does activism develop?
Oktober 09, 2017
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.“ Research will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirsch and Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer.
The outcomes will provide new knowledge concerning practices of democratic participation in the midst of urban and postcolonial crisis. With a focus on material and non-material infrastructure, the 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. For further information please see here.
Currently research on acitivism is taking place within the following projects:
- Sarah Riebel: Activism in Exile among Burmese migrants in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and in the Thai-Burmese border region
Click here for further information. - Nickey Diamond: Anti-Muslim Hate Speech in Myanmar
Click here for further information. - Judith Beyer: Expert activists advocating an end to statelessness in Europe
Click here for further infomation. - Raul Acosta: '"Toma-La Ciudad": Intersubjective Activism in Guadalajara's Streets and City Museum'
Click here for further information. - Franziska Duarte Dos Santos: ‘What it Takes to Be a Man.’ Christian Activism in the Field of Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
Click here for further information. - Carolin Hirsch: Activist becomings in contemporary Myanmar
Click here for further information. - Benedict Mette-Starke: Digital Rights Activism in Myanmar
Click here for further information. - Thomas G. Kirsch: Volunteer entanglements. On the ambiguities of volunteer engagement in Zambian organizational life
Click herefor further information. - Kim Molenaar: Sexual rights in Botswana. Christian perspectives and Christian lobbying
Click herefor further information. - Björn Herold: Making Home. Making Movement. Analyzing the occupation-based social movement ‚Reclaim The City‘ in Cape Town, South Africa
Click herefor further information. - Hanno Mögenburg: Materiality, techniques and knowledge of techno-activism in post-apartheid Johannesburg
Click herefor further information.
