Michi Knecht

University of Bremen

Michi Knecht is professor at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research of the University of Bremen, Germany. At U Bremen, she co-founded the Bremen NatureCultures-Lab (BNCL: http://naturenkulturen.de/) and the interdisciplinary research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC, link coming soon). Her main interest lies with knowledge production and epistemological practices, and she looks at this from a very diverse range of perspectives, including STS (Social Studies of Science, Technology and Society) inspired research on life sciences and reproductive technologies (and their implications for the understanding of kinship) as much as the de-colonisation and provincializing of knowledge and the relations between concepts of nature vs. culture. She is also involved in the development of methodological questions, such as widening the ethnographic tool kit in times of globalisation and through collaborative forms of knowledge production. She has done research on these topics in Germany, other parts of Europe, Turkey and Papua-New Guinea.
One of her activities around post-colonial and anthropological knowledge production is being part of the founders and Editorial Board Collective of a bilingual (English-German) blog on the future of museums, ethnographic collections and Humboldt’s legacy in anthropological museums (https://boasblogs.org/humboldt/). The most recent milestone in this was the Conference “Museum Collections in Motion: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters”, held in Cologne in July 2019 which included speakers from five continents (see programme here: https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/32059.html).
Michi can be contacted at: knecht@uni-bremen.de