Team

Rita Kesselring is a social anthropologist who assumed the role of Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the SHSS in August 2022. She works at the intersection of political, economic, legal and urban anthropology. Her main interest are global asymmetrical interdependencies, their consequences for the Global South, and the conditions for the possibility of change. Her doctoral work examined the legal route as a possibility for repairing the past at the example of apartheid victims and their class action suits against Western corporations. It is published as Bodies of Truth: law, memory and emancipation in post-Apartheid South Africa (2017) with Stanford University Press. The book Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province (ZED books / Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, open access) describes life in a new mining town in Zambia and its connections to the Swiss commodity trading hub. These two worlds are as strongly separated conceptually as they are connected functionally. The book attempts a symmetrical ethnography which understands Zambia and Switzerland as part of one single world, thereby taking seriously local, urban dynamics as much as the consequences of global labor divisions. The volume Mutter Unbekannt (September 2024, Chronos Verlag; edited with Andrea Abraham and Sabine Bitter, open access; English translation in early 2025) investigates inter-country adoptions from India to Switzerland between 1973 and 2002. Before coming to St.Gallen, Kesselring was a fellow at the University of Cape Town, University of Connecticut, Princeton University and the University of the Copperbelt, and assistant at the chair of social anthropology, University of Basel. For more publications and further details, see Alexandria.

Felicia Afriyie has a master's degree in political science with a focus on conflict management and migration studies. She has worked as an anti-discrimination counselor in Baden-Württemberg and as a diversity manager at the University of Konstanz. As a research associate at the Chair of Urban Studies, she centers her work on decolonisation efforts within the domains of local development, social work, community-oriented initiatives, and sustainable and cooperative agriculture in South Africa. In addition, she analyses forms of collaboration with the Global North against the backdrop of historically grown financial asymmetries as a colonial heritage. Her research aims to illuminate organisational and societal levels, processes, and structures, with the goal of investigating how local actors understand moments of empowerment and negotiate ideas of independence and self-efficacy in a postcolonial setting. For more information, see Alexandria.