Biography

I am social anthropolgist interested in the environment, the economy and time, mostly through the prism of peasant lifeforms. Before coming to Fribourg, I was involved in a research project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig that dealt with the past and present of dairying microbes and their interactions with animals and humans. In my PhD project I dealt with transnational infrastructure development in the Global South and the fundamental shifts it has gone through since the 1990s. On the example of Nepal's unbuilt Arun-3 dam, I trace the emergence of a global civil society network against large dams, the World Bank's pull-out from funding these projects and the recent comeback of large dams.