Research Interests
Environmental anthropology, political ecology, more-than-human anthropology, transhumanism, infrastructures, trees and vegetation, forests, social movements
Research area(s)
Sub-Saharan Africa, central-eastern Sahel, Chad, Sudan
Profile
Alexander Waiblinger is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology at Leipzig University, with a research interest in politico-environmental dynamics and more-than-human anthropology in the Arabic-speaking regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
He holds a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from Leipzig University, during which he conducted four months of fieldwork in Sudan, focusing in his Bachelor's thesis on the Third Sudanese Revolution (2018–19) and the protest movement that led to the ousting of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, which he examined through the lens of “ongoingness”. During his Bachelor's studies, he participated in the ASA project Afforestation in Sudan under the supervision of Dr. Enrico Ille, in which the research group examined the environmental impact of refugees and other actors on vegetation and forests in Sudan's White Nile State.
His Master's degree in Anthropology, which he completed at Leipzig University in 2026, included another four months of research in Chad's central Guéra Province, with a thematic focus on the “making of a landscape in disequilibrium”, more-than-human actors, and environmental interventions. During his Master's studies, he also worked as a student assistant in the Plants and Politics research group at the Leipzig Lab, in which an interdisciplinary group of scholars focused on retracing environmental interventions and regreening initiatives across the Sahel, with a special focus on a case study in Katsina State, northern Nigeria.
His PhD project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Andrea Behrends, explores more-than-human infrastructures, future-making, and the silent politics of vegetation in central and eastern Chad, with a particular focus on trees.