Alena Thiel

• Presentation
• CV
• Research outputs

My research is concerned with the role of (biometric) identification technologies in Ghana. Taking the promise of the “data revolution” of the Ghanaian population data system as a starting point, my ongoing project “Identification Technologies in Ghana” explores how Ghanaian policy makers integrate previously isolated, administrative population registers for new, interoperability-based applications.

I obtained my PhD in 2016 from the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law, University of Aberdeen. I have previously been a research fellow at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies (2011-2017), the University of Leipzig (2017) and the University of Bayreuth (2018-2019), and have carried out research fellowships at the African Studies Centre Leiden (2017), Sciences Po Paris (2018), and the University of the Witwatersrand/WiSER (2018). My projects have been awarded funding within the framework of the DFG priority programme SPP1448 (2017), the DAAD PRIME/EU Marie Curie Actions programme (2018-2019) and recently, the German Research Foundation’s individual research grant scheme (2019-2022). I am Associate Editor of Africa Spectrum.

Primary fields of research

Current research themes: Identification technologies; Data infrastructures; Measurement policies, ‘governance by numbers’; Technicization of citizenship; Sociology of quantification; Anthropology of the state; Theories of travelling models, translation and adaptation; Temporalities