Research Areas

Anthropology of Emotion

In recent years, the study of human emotion has become a subject of growing interest across diverse academic disciplines spanning the humanities and the natural and social sciences. Increasingly it is establishing itself as an important field of interdisciplinary inquiry, a fact reflected in the work of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1171 “Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds” (Director Prof. Dr. Birgitt Rötter-Rössler) and the interdisciplinary research projects “The Researcher’s Affects” and “Knowledge Complexity” (K-PLEX)” (both directed by Prof. Dr. Thomas Stodulka) at FU Berlin.

Anthropology of Emotion

Medical Anthropology | Global Health

Medical anthropology is by now an established sub-discipline of anthropology in German-speaking countries. In line with the approach of medical anthropology in the US and the UK, where the discipline is one of the most influential branches of social and cultural anthropology, it investigates illness, health and healing across societies and cultures world-wide.

Medical Anthropology | Global Health

Disaster Research Unit

The Disaster Research Unit (DRU), founded in 1987, is one of the pioneering institutions in Germany with a social-scientific and anthropological focus on disaster and catastrophe research. The field of research, teaching and consulting activity of the DRU covers the whole disaster and security cycle, ranging from the perception of risk, risk reduction and disaster prevention, to preparation, warning and disaster behavior, coping with disaster, and sustainable reconstruction in countries of the Global South as well as in industrialized countries. In recent years the research focus has been expanded to encompass sustainability, global environmental change—especially climate change mitigation, vulnerability and adaptation—and security research.

Disaster Research Unit

Religious Diversity in Transnational Contexts

Much of my current research is oriented towards the exploration of religious diversity in Eastern African cities, but I am equally interested in the way religious practice and organization have been affected and transformed by processes of globalization in rural and urban places in other parts of Africa and beyond. The main focus of my ongoing work on religion is on “new” Muslim and Christian organizations, but I am also concerned with the reconfiguration of ritual and “traditional” religious practice (including aspects of religious healing) in an interconnected world.

Religious Diversity

Gender, Body, Sexuality

This research area provides a platform for the debate and ethnographic study of gender, the human body and sexualities in the field of Social and Cultural Anthropology. It is anchored in feminist and queer anthropological approaches that engage in an analysis of the cultural and place-specific dynamics of gender, body and sexuality. The research area seeks to strengthen an ethnographic approach within transdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies on the one hand, and critical approaches to gender and sexualities within (German-speaking) Social and Cultural Anthropology on the other.