Luisa Schneider

Dr Luisa Schneider

Small Group Project 2024

Transcending the antipodal implications of structure and agency: towards an interrelated conceptualisation

This workshop breaks open the binary proposition of structure and agency and invites thinking in terms of their conceptual and real-world interconnectedness. Heeding the call to move beyond disciplinary boundaries (Lizardo 2013; Porpora 2015), we are assembling an interdisciplinary gathering of social scientists, to critically reflect on paradigmatic concepts that shape research methodologies, theorising, and outcomes. This undertaking necessitates epistemic reflexivity, and the intrepidity to challenge prevailing ontological presuppositions. It is here, within the enmeshment of transcendental theorization and concrete implications, that we contribute to the ISRF’s efforts to push beyond the conventional.

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Areas of interest

Cultural Anthropology Violence Intimacy Law Ethnography Sierra Leone Germany West Africa Western Europe

Cohort

CFW1

Biography

Luisa Schneider is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

She specialises in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law and has been conducting ethnographic research in Sierra Leone since 2011 and in Germany since 2018. Through combining empirical research with conceptual synthesis, Luisa studies how people negotiate the space to live their most intimate needs on various levels of social and legal organisation. She is particularly interested in the friction between care and control, between rights, protections and their practical realisation that arise from the divide between private and public spheres, both through the politico-legal separation between home/house and street, and through conflicting discourses regarding which areas of life states may regulate and in what way. Luisa is interested in inventive contractualism and creative syncretism and examines what laws ‘do’ and how they interact with how people govern their lives in diverse contexts.

Biographical details correct as of 08.05.25