My work has always been interested in epistemological questions of how people engage in and represent the world. This curiosity has manifested in various research projects from studying languages, codes, technologies to other semiotic value-laden practices. In my first master’s thesis, I analyzed the syntax of motion – how cows move along the river in Masaailand, Tanzania. In a second master’s I studied how mobile phones reconfigure social connectedness in Sudan. My PhD analyzed how women from the Nuba Mountains operationalize moral orders of worth in a context of modernity and Christianity. My current focus on space science in Africa builds along this axis, by inquiring into how knowledge in sensory technologies and astrophysics is constructed and embedded in socio-cultural, cognitive and philosophical models for how the world – or the universe – is structured. I’m particularly interested in how movement and disruption are perceived, diagnosed and mapped into this work. I draw heavily from linguistic anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to ask how data received by radio telescopes and processed by both human actors as well as artificial intelligence software is translated into actionable materials, maps or data sets which are then shared within the scientific communities and the broader public. What knowledge is produced and how does it reconfigure our understanding earth, and Africa on it, or above it, given this new contextualization? I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Siegen and an active member of several institutions beyond AOEN. These include: Cedej, SFB 1187: Media and Cooperation, LOST and MPI.
Africa Off-Earth Network 