Hanno Mögenburg

Education

Hanno Mögenburg is research associate and PhD student at the chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology. He graduated in Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and in Social and Cultural Anthropology (M.A.) at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.

In June 2018 he started working in the research project „Activist becomings in South Africa and Myanmar: Studying infrastructure and politics through the life-worlds of activists”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His current research and PhD project focuses on activist organisation and knowledge production on technology in the context of Johannesburg’s precarious electricity supply. Along with residents’ everyday engagements with infrastructures’ material, techno-scientific, discursive, and political dimensions at the metropole’s periphery, he explores how established notions of governability, expertise, sovereignty and legitimacy are challenged in the complex process of infrastructuring.

The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirsch.

Research interests

- infrastructures
- networks
- technology and techniques
- dis/connectivity
- informality
- politics of difference(s)
- the urban
- activism and resistant publics
- informal economies

Theoretical interests

- Science and Technologie Studies
- Material Turn
- Practice Theory
- Anthropology of Knowledge
- Sociology of Critique

Associations

- European Association for Social Anthropologists (EASA)
- German Anthropological Association (GAA)

Publications

Mögenburg, Hanno. 2022. "Stromausfall. Die Energiekrise spitzt sich zu." iz3w 393 Rohstoffe: 6-7.
Mögenburg, Hanno. 2022. "Entrenched provisionality. Struggling for public electricity in postapartheid Johannesburg." Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 94: 57–71.
Mögenburg, Hanno. 2021. “Landmarks of Indignation: Archiving Urban (Dis)Connectivity at Johannesburg’s Margins.” Roadsides 5: 31-37.

Conferences and Workshops

“Democratic Infrastructuring and Technopolitical Utopias: Postapartheid, Activism and Ordinary Interventions for Technological Sovereignty”, Workshop: Utopia(n) Challenges in Africa? Grinding Practices, Ethical Controversies, VAD 2021: Goethe Universität Frankfurt. (online)

“Still Struggling for Power: Politics of Electricity and Infrastructure in Post-Apartheid Soweto”, Workshop: The (non)negotiability of infrastructural development: examples from the Global South, DGSKA 2019, Konstanz.

“Inside the Infrapolitics of Service Delivery in Post-Apartheid South Africa“, Workshop: Bewegung, Protest, Aktivismus, 24. – 25.10.2019, Bodenseeforum, Konstanz.

“Contentious Connections: the Energopolitical Struggle at Johannesburg’s Infrastructural Margins”, Workshop: Public Goods and the Politics of Value, 16^th EASA 2020, Lisbon. (online)

“Civic Engineering at the Grid Edge: Infrastructures, Social Movements and the Politics of Expertification”, Workshop: How can STS support a multiplicity of practices in Citizen Science?, EASST4S 2020, Prague. (online)

“’When the lights go out…’: Tropes of Infrastructural Crisis in Contemporary South Africa”, Konferenz: Crisis and Infrastructures: responses to change between materiality and immateriality, Universitäten Verona, Padua, Ca' Foscari Venezia, 16.-17.11. 2020, Padua. (online)