Björn Herold

Björn Herold is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz , he started in June 2018.

Scientific background

Björn Herold is member of academic staff and PhD candidate at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. He studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Latin-American Studies (B.A.) at the University of Hamburg and completed his bachelor’s degree with his thesis Sexual partnerships and the spread of HIV: A network-analytical approach. During his master’s in anthropology also at the University of Hamburg, he shifted his attention to the topics of consumption practices, material culture and human-nature-relationships in southern Africa. After five months of field research in local Botsuana (Okavango Delta) in the interdisciplinary research project The Future Okavango he finished his masters with the work  “People can’t destroy nature” – Local consumption practices and their impacts on natural resources in rural Botsuana. He also did a one-month contract research on transformations of local water management in times of severe water shortage in three Namibian villages in the course of the project Local Institutions in Globalized Societies (LINGS).

After he stepped out of the academic world to be a self-employed trumpet teacher as well as working as a social manager in the largest camp for refugees in Hamburg (2014-2018), he became a PhD candidate in June 2018 at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. In the course of the research project Activist becomings in South Africa and Myanmar. Studying infrastructure and politics through activists’ life worlds he will conduct research on activist movements in Cape Town that engage against spatial apartheid and urban land injustice on both a legal level as well as on a very real level in diverse forms of protests. Björn Herold’s supervisor is Prof. Thomas G. Kirsch.

Main research interests

-        Activism and Protests

-        Urban theory

-        Urban land justice

-        Infrastructure

-        Theory of practice

-        Material Culture

-        Consumption

-        Human-Nature-Relationships

-        Networktheory