Dr. Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko

Her research project at the Max-Weber-Kolleg is entitled ‘Intangible Causes, Ambiguous Materials: Constellated Cosmologies of Urban Inequalities’. It will investigate the material and immaterial dimensions of economic inequality in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar. It will look at how, in the context of an unstable economy, objects believed to influence a household’s wealth can become ambiguous and immaterial cosmological causalities can become immanent. This research will follow the social life of things and processes that are thought to influence economic inequality, and how these things, elements or causalities, whether initially material, quasi-material or immaterial, instantiate themselves in the lives of Ulaanbaatar’s residents.