Faculty

Antina von Schnitzler is Associate Professor of International Affairs and Anthropology at NSSR. She also teaches and advises doctoral students in the Milano PhD Program in Public and Urban Policy. Her research and teaching has focused on technopolitics, citizenship and belonging; the anthropology of science and technology; neoliberalism; colonialism and postcoloniality; energy politics; and the use of AI technologies in cities. Her first book, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2016), received an honorable mention in the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize competition in 2017. She is currently working on two projects: One on energy and the politics of coal in South Africa and Germany,  focusing in particular on the relationship between energy transition and political transition. The second project focuses on the politics of AI technologies in cities, particularly in New York City. She is a co-convener of the African Studies Initiative (ASI) at The New School. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame and a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Before joining The New School, she taught at Reed College.

PhD 2010, Anthropology, Columbia University

BA 1999, Anthropology, University of Sussex

"Meters, Pipes, and the Materiality of Postcolonial Politics" in Ballim, Faeeza, Bronwyn Kotzen and Richard Rottenburg (eds). Translating Technology in Africa Vol IV Devices. (Brill, forthcoming)

"Disciplining Freedom: Apartheid, Counterinsurgency and the Political Histories of Neoliberalism" in Slobodian, Quinn and Dieter Plehwe (eds). Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (Princeton University Press, 2022)

"Political Society and Popular Politics in Africa: An Introduction" (with Ruchi Chaturvedi) Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Vol 39 (1), Spring 2019.

"Notes on Democracy's Infrastructure" in Democracy in Africa Blog, July 21, 2019

"Infrastructure, Late Apartheid Techno-Politics and Temporalities of "Transition"" in Anand, Nikhil, Appel, Hannah and Akhil Gupta (eds). The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2018).

Meters, Measurement, Mediation in Cross, Jamie, Abram, Simone, Anusas, Mike and Schick, Lea. (2017) Our Lives with Electric Things, Cultural Anthropology Online, December 2017.

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2016) [Honorable Mention, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) Book Prize, 2017]

"Preface: Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics" (with Stephen J. Collier & James Christopher Mizes) Limn Issue 7, November 2016

“Ends” Infrastructure Toolbox. Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, September 24, 2015, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/713-ends

"Performing Dignity: Human Rights, Citizenship and the Techno-Politics of Law in South Africa” American Ethnologist, Vol. 41 (2), May 2014.

"Traveling Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa" Cultural Anthropology, Vol 28 (4), November 2013.

"Gauging Politics: Water, Commensuration and Citizenship in South Africa" Anthropology News, January 2010.

"Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability and Techno-Politics in South Africa" Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4, December 2008.

Academia.edu Profile: https://newschool.academia.edu/AntinavonSchnitzler