Lucilla Lepratti
I have been teaching and pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Anthropology of Leipzig University since April 2024. My research focuses on anti-mafia movements on Sicily. I ask how anti-mafia grassroot activists imagine social justice and which role they assign to the state therein. In the past semester I taught a seminar about the Anthropology of the so-called Middle East. We discussed social movements and their historical contexts, colonial continuities, forms of resistance and critiques of orientalist discourses about West Asian and North African societies.
It is my pleasure to work at the “Institut für Ethnologie”, although I prefer “anthropological” for my own approach. I want to contribute to an Anthropology which, because of its responsibilities in colonial relations, takes the full spectrum of human possibilities seriously and thereby fosters an imagination and practice of better ways of living together. Ethnographic and anthropological methods allow us to produce and exchange knowledge in close relation with people and their lived experiences, through which we can – in the words of Walter Benjamin – brush history against the grain.
Susann Ludwig
I am currently working as a lecturer for special assignments at the institute and and this past summer I taught a seminar called „Space / Ethnographies“. Students can come to me with questions regarding internships and I supervise bachelor's and master’s thesis. For my PhD, I worked with university graduates in Bamako, Mali to find out how they navigate the country’s uncertain job market and looked at how they both find and create career opportunities for themselves in the present and with regards to the future.
At the moment, I am researching aha-moments (lightbulb-moments) in interdisciplinary collaborations around the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO). I want to understand what happens, when we understand something as well as what allows for the possibility of understanding in the first place. Anthropological research requires curiosity and fosters the willingness to be surprised. This is precisely what opens up new perspectives and, thus, necessary space between binaries, which ultimately show that our concepts and the world could be different.
Thiago Pinto Barbosa
I am a researcher and lecturer at the institute. I am currently developing a habilitation project about global inequality, sustainability transitions, and lithium mining. Besides environmental conflicts, my research has focused on (anti-)racism, memory, and history of anthropology, and I have done fieldwork in Germany, India, Brazil, and Mozambique. I am also very interested in questions of science and power, especially in relation to categorizations of difference and social inequalities.
For me, anthropology is the science that expands our vision about what is human and what worlds are possible. Anthropology shows that things can be different, because they are already different somewhere else. I would like to push anthropology to be better attuned to societal and political questions, and to contribute to more inclusive and diverse worlds.
