Bridging Research and Activism
Joint comparative research project on “Activist becomings in South Africa and Myanmar“ at the University of Konstanz granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the duration of 3 years
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 Asian and African studies.
Research will be supervised by anthropology professors Judith Beyer and Thomas Kirsch, both at the University of Konstanz. Beyer and Kirsch have been researching in the „Cultural Foundations of Social Integration“ Center of Excellence, focusing on Myanmar (Beyer) and South Africa (Kirsch) respectively. With two PhD positions for each country as well as material resources, the project has been granted a total of 830,000 Euro.
The researchers expect the joint project to provide new knowledge about practices of democratic participation in the midst of urban and postcolonial crisis. What is more, the research project explicitly seeks to disseminate knowledge and build bridges between scholarly research and activism.