Luisa T. Schneider

I specialise in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law and have been conducting ethnographic research in Sierra Leone since 2011 and in Germany since 2018. Through combining empirical research with conceptual synthesis, I study how people negotiate the space to live their most intimate needs on various levels of social and legal organisation. I am 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. I am interested in inventive contractualism and creative syncretism and examine what laws ‘do’ and how they interact with how people govern their lives in diverse contexts.