Guests of the Bayreuth Academy in the last five years

Our Guests

Miss/es Dr. Sandra Calkins

Inviting institution:	Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies
Stay:	30. September 2017
Home university:	Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology Halle (Deutschland)
Personal information:	Sandra is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a member of the LOST Group at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Leipzig in 2014 and has lectured at the universities in Leipzig, Halle, and Hamburg. Her PhD project explored the fundamental uncertainty of existence in conditions of marginalisation. She conducted ethnographic research in northeastern Sudan, examining how people in northeastern Sudan (Rashaida) deal with lacking predictability due to on-going poverty, insecure incomes, hunger, and disease. Her dissertation won the young scholar award of the German Association for African Studies and is published as Who Knows Tomorrow? Uncertainty in  North-Eastern Sudan, which explores anticipatory knowledge, ways of knowing the unknowable future, and proposes a novel approach to studying uncertainty that focuses on means of establishing collectivity and enhancing security. She co-edited the volume Disrupting Territories: Land, Commodification and Conflict in Sudan (2014, James Currey) and authored different papers and chapters. Sandra’s new research project explores how nutritional interventions and life sciences establish factual connections between agriculture and nutrition in Uganda. More concretely, it examines the evidentiary links between the construction of hidden hunger as a problem and biofortification, agricultural strategies to enrich plant genomes with nutrients, as a solution. The project investigates the role of new Ugandan middle-classes in spearheading crop research and development and thus in driving processes of difference/integration in a dynamic organisational field comprising "vulnerable groups" (children, pregnant and lactating women), farming communities, humanitarian interventions, governmental plans, scientific research, and new public-private initiatives in response to food insecurity.   At the Academy, she took part in the workshop "Waiting in Africa" of the postdoc working group "Waiting for Futures".