dr. S. Calkins (Sandra)

I am Associate Professor of Environment, Technology and Decolonial Knowledge. As an anthropologist of science, I study how knowledge about the environment comes to matter and shapes the health and futures of collective life. I am committed to thinking from, with and alongside particular lives, both human and more-than-human, relationships and worlds. I’m interested in what attending to such mundane and often taken-for-granted perspectives and forms of knowing offers our theorizing. I ask such questions alongside indigenous philosophers, ecofeminists, de-, post- and anticolonial scholars, queer and disability theorists and other fellow travelers who through their example, activism and writing animate my scholarship. I seek to develop a critical sensitivity, both as a teacher and researcher, that challenges dominant perspectives, questions the status quo and carves out possibilities of being and doing otherwise—this I take to be particularly vital in the context of a damaged planet, lingering histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation and growing inequalities in the world. 

Before joining the University of Twente, I was Assistant Professor of STS and Environmental Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, a member of the Law, Organization, Science and Technology group at the University of Halle and completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. My work has been funded by the German Research Foundation, the Climate Center at the University of Twente, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Berlin University Alliance, the UNA-Europa network, Freie Universität’s research commission and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). My work has appeared in journals such as Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Africa, Medicine Anthropology Theory, The Sociological Review, and Somatosphere.

Organisations

• Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), Knowledge, Transformation & Society (KiTeS)