Biography
Clemens Greiner is an extraordinary professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He is the academic coordinator of the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne in Germany, where he also is an adjunct professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He was trained in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Geography at the University of Hamburg, where he received his PhD in Anthropology with a multi-sited ethnography on rural-urban migration in Namibia. In his current research, he focuses on political ecology, translocality, (energy) infrastructures and the transformation of rural areas. His regional specialisation is on Eastern and Southern Africa, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork. In his current research projects, Clemens focuses on infrastructures and governance for renewable energies, on the commodification of wild plants, and – together with PLAAS as a main partner – on the emergence of medium-scale farmers in rural Africa.
His recent publications deal with energy infrastructures in rural peripheries (), the political ecology of geothermal energy in Kenya, African pastoralism, and translocality and rural transformation.
Read more about him here.