Valerie Hänsch holds a PhD from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). She has worked as a lecturer at the University of Bayreuth, LMU Munich, the University of Khartoum and the University of Vienna. Her research has focused on technologies, large-scale infrastructures, socio-ecological changes and displacement in the Sudan. She also worked in a collaborative research project on Sudanese audiovisual heritage and image restitution at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Her current research explores the links between activism, aesthetic practices and affect in the revolutionary process in Sudan. As a visual anthropologist, she has produced several collaborative ethnographic films. Her film “Sifinja – The Iron Bride” (2009) has been awarded several prizes. She is co-editor of the special journal issue “Temporalities of Waiting in Africa” (Critical African Studies, 2020) and is author of the monograph “The Attempt to Stay. Dam Building, Displacement, and Resistance in the Nile Valley, Sudan” (Berghahn Books, 2024).
MIASA Project: Affect and aesthetic activism in Sudan’s revolution
The project explores aesthetic practices and their affective dynamics during the Sudanese revolution and post-coup protests of 2021. First, it investigates the production, perception and remediation of emerging aesthetic practices by artists/activists as an intervention in public spaces. Second, it explores how artists/activists after the 2021 coup continued to resist and reclaim the city through visual and acoustic interventions. The research pursues two main questions: How did aesthetic practices and its sensual perception contribute to a sense of change in the movement and how did aesthetic practices continue to mediate change through the re-making of Khartoum? In a third step, the project examines aesthetic anti-war productions of exiled artists who had to flee their homes after the outbreak of war in April 2023. By looking through an aesthetic lens the project contributes to the ethnographic analysis of the relationship between aesthetic activism, affects and social movements.
Selected publications
Hänsch, Valerie (2024): The Attempt to Stay. Dam Building, Displacement, and Resistance in the Nile Valley, Sudan. London: Berghahn Books.
Hänsch, Valerie (2022): „Aesthetics of the Unfamiliar: Experiencing Displacement – Reviving Life“. Current Anthropology 63:4.
Hänsch, Valerie (2021): „The Anthropologist’s Video Camera as Stage: Forced Displacement and Production of Audio-visual Witnessing in Northern Sudan“. Special Issue: Witnessing – Truths, Technologies, and Transformations, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 39:1, S. 37–54, DOI:10.3167/cja.2021.390104.
