New postdoc researcher at the Centre of African Studies

Mads Yding is a new postdoc on a Carlsberg Foundation Reintegration Fellowship. Before coming to Copenhagen, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research was undertaken at Aarhus University and was focused on local experiences of colonial and postcolonial development efforts in the Turkana area of Northwestern Kenya in the 20th century.

Mads explains that he is looking forward to ‘returning’ to the Centre of African Studies, where he did parts of his BA and MA. He is a historian by training with an MA in International and Global History from Aarhus University and visiting fellowships at the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, and the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.

His research interests include local experiences and histories, pastoral societies, development politics, environmental history and the agency of environments in shaping social and political structures. He works in the intersection between development history, environmental history and historical anthropology. He has co-created multiple oral histories in the Turkana area and worked extensively with fishing communities along the western shores of Lake Turkana and agricultural communities along the Turkwel River.

Building on his previous research, Mads’ current project is an environmental and social history of the way nature has affected government policies, development ideologies and practices, and the perceptions of ordinary people in Northern Kenya.

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