Welcome to my website! It has been online for almost twenty years. I first started this website after spending one year as an exchange student in Malaysia in 2001. Please check out these pages with information on myself, my previous research, expertise and current work, not to forget my long-time hobby of photography.
Read more...My experiences so far have been shaped by my education and work in the academic sector. I have been guided by particular research questions, but also how information technologies can assist us in establishing conclusions. I have worked both voluntarily and professionally in interdisciplinary and multilingual settings that necessitated intercultural knowledge, team leading skills and the capacity to coordinate complex projects.
Read more...For the open access edited volume Across the Copperbelt I wrote down the story of the Serve Zambia Foundation. It was founded as a home-based care initiative in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the early 2000s. Like many other private initiatives the foundation reappropriated a former social welfare building of the local mining corporation: an old mine clinic. The clinic had been left to processes of post-industrial ruination following the reprivatisation of Zambia's copper sector. Starting from the colonial and corporate history of Luanshya and based on the case of the Serve Zambia Foundation my chapter retraces social and material change in the former mine township of Mpatamatu.
Previous cover stories...Hermeneutics and discourse analysis were at the centre of my methodological training and research activity at university. My research foci in Chinese Studies were the Jesuit missions to Imperial China, the South East Asian Overseas Chinese and the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the ideological establishment of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s.
In pursuit of my PhD, I turned to the discipline of social anthropology and ethnographic research in the tradition of the Manchester School. My topical focus shifted to China in Africa with Zambia as a field site in particular, and mining in the context of colonial Southern Africa and post-colonial processes of ruination and renovation in more general.
Since my father taught me how to pronounce 'Multispektralkamera' as a toddler, I am interested in photography. Always with my camera at hand, I attempt to submerge into the world around me.
I am currently working on a book and a chapter for an edited volume. They are due with Berghahn Books and James Currey in 2021. Both publications deal with the topic of post-colonial and post-industrial ruination and renovation in the context of the Zambian Copperbelt.