Alena Thiel

Kort præsentation

Primary field of research

State knowledge systems, especially, biometric identification technologies, census and census histories, digital health records (DHIS2), digital addressing, digital payment solutions, datafication in disaster risk reduction, African/feminist AI;

Anthropology of the state, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Sociology of Quantification, African Studies;

Ghana, Senegal, Botswana, Kenya

Current research

Modelling African Futures: A comparative technography of evidence-based welfare policy in Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana (ModelFutures),

ERC Starting Grant, 2025 – 2030, Modelling African Futures: A comparative technography of evidence-based welfare policy in Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana | ModelFutures | Project | Fact Sheet | HORIZON | CORDIS | European Commission

Welfare systems rely on extensive knowledge about the population to plan, finance, and expend limited resources in a targeted manner. In view of their often-fragmented national identification and statistical systems, Africa’s emerging welfare states are thus facing significant challenges in their capacity to establish categories of welfare entitlement and to target groups for intervention. Led by the PI, ModelFutures’ team will carry out ground-breaking, comparative ethnographic research at the statistics-welfare nexus of four African country cases – Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana – to understand: How do states generate truths about future welfare in contexts of uncertain knowledge about the population and its wellbeing? The project’s threefold objectives aim to (1) trace statistical modelling practices in the context of multi-facetted uncertainties about the population and its environs; (2) analyse the impact of adaptations and creative data practices on quantitative truth claims; and (3) connect statistical future-making and anticipatory welfare politics in sites of statistical innovation. ModelFutures’ ambition significantly extends beyond the state of the art of our understanding of statistical world-making by developing a novel concept of prediction that attunes to experts’ skilful adaptations of globally circulating computational models and standards, while attending to their modelling practices’ co-constitution with symbolic commitments and situated infrastructural arrangements. Combining expertise from anthropology, science and technology studies, and population statistics, ModelFutures generates novel theory on the production of evidence-based welfare policies in contexts of contested claims to the validity of data, methods, and the anticipatory politics that play out between short-term mitigation efforts and the pursuit of long-term dividends.

Previous research grants and awards:

• 2024 – 2027 PI, ‘Katastrophenrisiken und Verdatung in Ghana ─ Eine Ethnographie der antizipatorischen Wissensproduktion’, German Research Foundation (grant declined)
• 2023 – 2025 PI, ‘Managing Uncertainty in Disaster Risk Reduction: An Ethnography of Data Practices in Ghana’s Emergency Preparedness and Early Intervention Infrastructure’ (MUNDI), Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship
• 2019 – 2023 Co-PI, ‘How Democracies Know: Identification technologies and quantitative analyses of development in Ghana’, German Research Foundation
• 2018 – 2019 PI, ‘Biometric Measurement Policies in Africa’, DAAD PRIME/EU Marie Curie Actions programme
• 2017 – 2018 PI, ‘Biometric Identification Technologies and Citizenship in Ghana’, postdoctoral start up grant of the DFG Priority Programme ‘Adaptation and Creativity in Africa’
• 2010 – 2013 Doctoral scholarship, ‘Heterotemporal Convergences: Travelling Significations of Order and Their Adaptations in the Claims-Making Strategies of Accra’s Makola Market Traders’,University of Aberdeen, Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law

CV

Education

• 2015 PhD, Political Research, Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom
• 2010 MPhil (Research Master), African Studies, African Studies Centre, Leiden University, The Netherlands
• 2008 BA, Social Anthropology (with minor in Media Studies), Free University Berlin, Germany

Academic positions

since September 2025: Associate Professor, Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen

2023 – 2025 Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Business IT/Technologies in Practice, IT University Copenhagen
2019 – 2023 Senior Researcher/Principal Investigator, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Halle
2018 – 2019 DAAD PRIME Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth
2017 – 2018 Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Area Studies, University of Leipzig
2011 – 2017 Research Fellow, Institute of African Affairs, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies/Leibniz Institute for Regional Studies, Hamburg, Germany

Academic citizenship, coordination, and organisation of scientific networks and meetings

Member of the UCPH Strategy Implementation Group for an Innovative and Solution-Oriented University

Member of the cross-faculty UCPH AI strategic initiative

Co-convener of the AEGIS Collaborative Research Group ‘Digital Africa’

Editorial positions and reviewing activities

Editorial board member, Brill AEGIS African Studies Series
Associate Editor, Africa Spectrum
Reviewer for the annual crisis indicator measurement of the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development
Reviewer for the German Research Foundation Individual Grant and International Synergy Schemes
Reviewer for several peer-reviewed, international scientific outlets, incl. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Elements, African Studies Review, Critical African Studies

International fellowships
2020 – 2023: Senior Researcher, ‘Regions2050: Mobile Spaces, Porous Border, Pathways of Regionalization’ (PI Achille Mbembe), WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

2022 Guest researcher, Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen (12 months)
2018/19 Visiting Fellow, WiSER, Wits University, South Africa (6 months)
2018 Visiting Fellow, Sciences Po Paris, France (6 months)
2017 Visiting Fellow, African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands (12 months)

Teaching

At the Centre of African Studies, I teach the MA courses "Introduction to African Studies", "Politics, Development and Change", and "Advanced Research Methods". I have also contributed lectures to the CAS course "New Frontiers in Africa".

Previous courses taught include "The Digital State" (IT University Copenhagen), "The African State and its Discontents" (University of Hamburg), "State registration systems in the context of technological change" and "Transnational perspectives on Ghanaian politics, society and culture" (University of Halle).

I currently supervise the following PhD students:

• Timothy Elikem Harvor 
• Johanne Rebsdorf (co-supervisor)