Michi Knecht
Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Bremen University
Michi Knecht is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Bremen University, Germany.
Her research and teaching focuses on interconnections between practices of knowledge production and social forms and on how ethnographic methods can be used to address the complexities of contemporary everyday worlds. In her work, she combines approaches from social, cultural and medical anthropology with perspectives from science and technology studies (STS).Her research has examined social and cultural implications of assisted reproductive technologies, political and religious movements in the field of reproduction, new forms of kinship, as well as poverty and inequality.
Currently, she is conducting research on the social productivity of anonymity and on how contemporary regimes of anonymity are reconfigured at the interfaces of infrastructures, regulation and social practice. She further investigates economies of reproduction and, in the context of the UPWEB project, bricolages or assemblages of knowledge and support in times of health crises.
With Friederike Gesing and Michael Flitner, she co-founded the Bremen NatureCulture Lab as a site for developing new research designs in human-body, human-other species and human-environment relations.
Methodologically, she is interested in further extending the ethnographic tool kit, in longtime ethnography and permanent fieldsites and in combing ethnography with other (quantitative, experimental, collaborative) methods.
Her English language publications include 'Reproductive technologies as global form: Ethnographies of knowledge, practices, and transnational encounters' (2012 Campus Publishers with Maren Klotz and Stefan Beck) and 'Beyond Change and Persistence? Concepts of Crisis in Cultural and Social Anthropology' (2015 Handbook of International Crisis Communications Research, Wiley Blackwell, with Stefan Beck).
Contact: Knecht@uni-bremen.de