Sandra Calkins

Sandra Calkins is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the LOST research network hosted at the University of Halle. Her work integrates science and technology studies with medical anthropology to interrogate how evidence about global health interventions is produced, circulated, and contested.

Education

• PhD, Anthropology – Leipzig University (2014)
• M.A., Anthropology – Leipzig University (2008)

Research Interests

Drawing on pragmatism and STS, Calkins examines how material-semiotic assemblages shape social orderings and public health problem definitions. Her current project, "Better Bananas for Ugandans," investigates biofortification as a high-tech agricultural fix for micronutrient deficiencies. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda and Australia, she traces how human bodies, banana plants, transgenes, and funding agencies are enrolled into experimental regimes that produce evidence of efficacy and safety.

She is particularly concerned with:

• Infrastructures of evidence and their global politics
• Agenda-setting in public health nutrition
• Tensions between emerging biological paradigms (e.g., epigenetics) and established biomedical truths
• The affective and temporal dimensions of scientific work in post-colonial settings

Publication Trends

Calkins’s recent output (2019-2021) clusters around three thematic nodes: (1) ethnographies of laboratory and field science in Uganda, (2) critical analyses of evidence and valuation in global health, and (3) theoretical contributions to STS and medical anthropology. Collectively, these works advance a more-than-human anthropology that foregrounds plants, chemicals, and infrastructures as co-constitutive actors in technoscientific worlds.

Scientific Awards

No specific awards or fellowships are listed in the provided material.

Research Funding & Teams

Her research has been supported through the collaborative LOST program (Law, Organization, Science and Technology). She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork since 2015 at the National Agricultural Research Laboratories in Kawanda, Uganda, working alongside plant breeders, molecular biologists, nutritionists, and local farming communities.