Uli Beisel

Uli’s work is inspired by Science and Technology Studies, Social Anthropology and Human Geography. With partners at Bayreuth, Halle-Wittenberg and Makerere Universities Uli is currently involved in a collaborative research project on the translation of new health technologies in Uganda and Rwanda, where the aim is to analyse how therapeutic agencements change when travelling technologies are being translated to particular sites. In order to trace these processes, practices of creativity, adaptation and organizational learning for three different global health technologies (malaria rapid diagnostic tests, medial data infrastructures and integrated community case management) are documented (2013-2015). Uli also studied the implementation of rapid diagnostic tests in an outreach project of Médecins Sans Frontières in Sierra Leone (2011), and the ethical and socio-ecological implications of the development and testing of genetically modified mosquitoes (2010).

Uli’s PhD research on malaria control in Ghana was concerned with the relations between mosquito-parasite-human interactions, health politics and the social ecology of malaria. The thesis explored the conditions and possibilities of coexistence between humans and other-than-humans (2006-2010). She continues to be fascinated by the question how we might live together with organisms that are harmful to human health.

Uli is currently developing new work on (renewable) energies and the energy/food nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. This builds on earlier research on the implementation of decentralised, small-scale waterpower stations in Madagascar (2006, with Dr. Melanie Jaeger-Erben, TU Berlin), and on the history of the first citizens’ owned wind park in Germany (2004-5).

Uli is co-founder and editor of the open access book publisher Mattering Press http://www.matteringpress.org. Mattering Press provides a platform to experiment with ways of producing academic books that encourages shared scholarship and mutual support as well as novel book formats while ensuring the high quality that is traditionally associated with blind peer review processes. The aim is to begin to reshape the social and material relations surrounding the production of relational work, through shifting the various, often asymmetrical, terms of engagement between publishers, authors, readers, and networks of distribution.