Team > Eileen Jahn

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Epistemologies of the Global South

Scientific career

• Since 12/2020: Doctoral Fellow at the Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South
  
• 2018–2020: M.Sc. Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Thesis: Guardians of Trust:
An Ethnographic Account on Mistrust and Trust in Democratization (thesis research in South Africa)
  
• 2016–2018: B.A. Cultural Studies / Art-Media-Aesthetic Education, University of Bremen, Germany
  

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Epistemologies of the Global South

Research areas and interests

• Central and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Southern Africa
• infrastructures, coloniality of power/knowledge, decolonization, social movements, anthropology of ethics, activism, critical urbanism

Current Project: 

“Ugesi Ngowethu”: Politics of Access to Electricity Networks in South Africa 

The Ph.D. project’s objective is to explore the politics of access to electricity networks as they are mobilized around struggles for electricity by undersupplied and precariously connected poor urban residents. The main focus rests on the experiences and knowledges employed by them through strategies of non-payment, self-connection, manipulation, and destruction of electricity infrastructures in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Thinking from and with the positions of people at the margins of the electricity network yields three key insights: (1) what electricity comes to signify for the residents; (2) what (un)fulfilled promises, expectations, and grievances residents assemble as parts of the demand for equitable, affordable and reliable access to electricity in South Africa; and (3) how current struggles and practices around the electricity undersupply relate to historical experiences and strategies resisting colonial power.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Epistemologies of the Global South

Publications

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Epistemologies of the Global South

Eileen Jahn
Doctoral Fellow

University of Bayreuth
Building: Zapf Haus 2
Nürnberger Straße 38
​D-95448 Bayreuth

E-mail: eileen.jahn@uni-bayreuth.de
Homepage: Anthropology | Universität Bayreuth