Phone: +49 7531 88-2907
E-Mail: eva.riedke@uni-konstanz.de
Office hours: by request via e-mail
Room: F518a
POB: 38
Scientific career
She has been working as a post-doc researcher in the division ‘Social and Cultural Anthropology’ at the University of Konstanz since March 2019. After completing her PhD in anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in 2017, she received a ‘start-up grant’ from the DFG Priority Programme SPP 1448 and worked as a post-doc at the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz (2018-2019).
Research interests
Her research and teaching draws inspiration from political anthropology, anthropology of the state, infrastructure studies, feminist and gender studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her research has focused on forms of political participation, the relationship of culture and technology, infrastructures and their breakdown and on human-environment relations.
In her DFG-Project “Life off the grid: the study of solar infrastructure and ethical subjects”, she is pursuing an ethnographic study of the life cycle of so-called “off grid” solar products and technologies. The project is concerned with exploring the logics, assumptions, principles and meaning-making practices of those who develop and market off-grid solar products, as well as the day-to-day experiences, reflections, negotiations and critiques of those living “off” or “under” the grid in rural Kenya.
The project follows the proposition that energy hereby offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through ethics. How are solar products are inscribed with both an ethic of care for “distant others” as well as with explicit for-profit, commercial interests? Further, in the case of off-grid customers and users, how do infrastructures and electricity come to mediate claims to rights, entitlements and citizenship? How does electricity and infrastructure more generally feature in public sentiments of progress, modernity and wellbeing, in aspirations and expectations of a new time, of a “good life”?
“Thinking with grids”, so the idea of the project, promises an innovative approach that brings together different fields of ethnographic study with one another (the anthropology of energy, the anthropology of (development) politics and markets and the anthropology of ethics). Further, the project tries to make conceptual/theoretical contribution by rendering tangible how “the ethical” emerges from day-to-day social actions and interactions around infrastructures.
Regional focus
- Southern Africa, particularly South Africa and East Africa
Empirical research
- ongoing fieldwork in Ulm, Berlin and Nairobi (2018 - until further notice)
- 13 months field research in Durban, South Africa (2011-2013)
- 2 months field research in Cape Town, South Africa (2011)
Publications
Riedke, E. (2023) 'Counting the Impacts in the Solar Off Grid Sector‘, In: Aaron Pinnix, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito, Nora Binder (Eds.), Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 201-208.
Riedke, E. (2023) 'A Solar Off-Grid Software: The Making of Infrastructures, Markets and Consumers ‘Beyond Energy’, In: S. Sareen & K. Müller (Eds.) Digitisation and Low-carbon Energy Transition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31-53.
Riedke, E., & Adelmann, C. (2022). The good payers: Exploring notions of ownership in the sale of pay-as-you-go solar home systems. Energy Research & Social Science, 92, 102773.
Riedke, E. (2021) 'Inner Dialogues: Negotiations Unfolding between the Field and one’s Desk'. Ethnoscripts, 23(1).
Drotbohm, Heike & Eva Riedke (2018) ‘Expecting justice: struggling with the indeterminate between ideals and practices’, The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, Vol. 50, Issue 3, pp. 294-298.
Riedke, Eva (2018) ‘Concerning Issues: Making Things Political in Durban’, published PhD Dissertation, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Available open source through Gutenberg Qualify.
Riedke, Eva (2016) ‘Antagonising ‘past times’ — A King Shaka statue in Durban’. IN: Riedke, E. (Ed.) The ordering power of narratives, Working Paper of the DFG Priority Programme 1448, Nr. 21, pp. 5-16.
Riedke, Eva & Rottenburg, Richard (2016) ‘Introduction’. IN: Riedke, E. (Ed) The ordering power of narratives, Working Paper of the DFG Priority Programme 1448, Nr. 21, pp. 5-16.
Gebauer, C., Riedke, E. & Schräpel, N. (2015). "Introduction: Space and the production of order and disorder“, IN: Gebauer, C. (Ed). "Space and the production of order and disorder." Working Paper of the DFG Priority Programme 1448, Nr. 12, pp. 3-5.
Riedke, Eva (2015) ‘You shouldn’t be seen talking to them!’ - Accidental frontlines, building trust and coping with danger’. Civilisations, Vol. 64, pp. 115-125.