The 2022 winter school is hosted by Thomas Stodulka (FU Berlin), Ferdiansyah Thajib (Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg), Katja Liebal (University of Leipzig), and Maximilian Leipold (FU Berlin) and is supported by the CRC 1171 Affective Societies (FU Berlin) and the Leipzig Lab (University of Leipzig).

Ferdiansyah Thajib is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Elite Graduate Program "Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures“ (SDAC), at Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg. He completed his doctoral study at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin in 2020. Before joining SDAC, he was a Postdoctoral fellow at the “Children and Nature“ working group at Leipzig Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub at Leipzig University. Ferdi’s lifework is situated at the intersections of theory and praxis, with specific interests in queer modes of endurance and forms of affective entanglement in everyday life. Ferdi is a member of KUNCI, a non-disciplinary collective in Yogyakarta that experiments on modes of producing and sharing knowledge through studying together.

Katja Liebal is the head of the human biology and primate cognition group at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Institute of Biology, and she is the spokesperson of the Leipzig Lab at Leipzig University, where she leads the project Children and Nature together with Daniel Haun, director of the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology. Within this international cooperation between scientists, local research assistants and public institutions, they investigate how animal-directed attitudes of children develop in different societies and how these attitudes may vary depending on age, socio-cultural context, and the role of a given species within a society.

Thomas Stodulka is Junior Professor of Social, Cultural, and Psychological Anthropology at FU Berlin. His work focuses on affect, emotion, childhood and adolescence, alternative economies and education, mental health, and affective methodologies. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related children, young men and women in Indonesia, and he has directed international projects on the role of affect and emotion in fieldwork and ethnography, envy in transcultural perspectives, economies of solidarity, and critical perspectives on big data. His current work focuses on eco-social movements, permaculture, and liberation pedagogies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Maximilian Leipold is a Bachelor student at the FU Berlin. His major is social and cultural anthropology and his minor is journalism and communication studies. He works as a student assistant in the CRC Affective Societies for Thomas Stodulka. His interests lie in psychological anthropology, the anthropology of beauty and the body, and visual anthropology. His research focuses on East Germany, Eastern Europe and post-Soviet states. He is active in the student council initiative as well as a mentor for new students. In his most recent research, he worked on the topic of feelings and changes in the way employees think and act at the "Bahnhofsmission am Zoo" in Berlin.