Research Interests
Environmental Anthropology; moral anthropology; STS; pragmatism; human/forest entanglements; questions of care and ethics; decolonization
Research Area(s)
Sierra Leone, West Africa
Departmental Activities
Working Groups: Lived Utopias
Profile
David Kananizadeh joined the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ as a PhD candidate in October 2021.
His research studies human-forest entanglements in Sierra Leone and investigates the social, economic and moral dimensions of sustaining ecology, life and subjectivation. To this end, he examines how inhabitants of eastern Sierra Leone’s forested landscapes care, cultivate and foster – but also control, exploit and destroy – ecological relations in their efforts to achieve well-being. David unpacks ecological relations by following the negotiations and reworkings of subsistence farming, logging and mining – those fields of practice that forest dwellers navigate to sustain both their own lives and their ecological conditions.
David received both his BA and MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Before joining the MPI, he held a scholarship from the Research Cluster “Society and Culture in Motion” at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (2018–2021).
Together with Sung-Joon Park, Sylvanus Spencer and Susan Erikson, he organized the summer school “From disaster to planetary care” in Freetown in 2019, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s “Knowledge for Tomorrow” program.
He is assistant editor of the 4S-Blog Backchannels and member of the LOST Research Group