MH Manuel is an anthropologist, geographer and political scientist specializing in qualitative methods, primarily multi-sited ethnography. His research investigates how knowledge and policy shifts across scales, lifeworlds and sites of intervention, and how global discourses and normative regimes are negotiated in situated practice.
His work at CryoCultures focuses on securitization infrastructures for cold chains. Using the example of tracking and automation technologies, such as blockchain, he examines what futures are envisioned, enacted and contested through sociotechnical systems. Before joining the ERC project, he pursued his PhD research at the Collaborative Research Center “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” (SFB 1199) in Leipzig as a research fellow at Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, and Technische Universität Dresden.
He has previously worked on the socio-material and epistemic challenges that complicate the governance of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) at the disjuncture between Global Health imaginary and local realities, mobility subjectivity and spatial imaginations in the context of aspirational urban infrastructures, as well techno-utopian ideologies. His regional focus is India.