Overview
Maik joined the department as a PhD student having earned his BA in Sociology from Heidelberg University and his MSc in Medical Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He also worked as a tutor and research assistant at the Max-Weber-Institute in Heidelberg where he supervised undergraduate students. As an advocate of interdisciplinary discourse and research, Maik is acquainted with both quantitative and qualitative approaches to social scientific inquiry.
His research broadly concerns contested therapeutic knowledges and healing techniques in cross-cultural settings. With a particular focus on mestizo shamanism, Maik aims to elucidate how traditional Amazonian plant medicines are appropriated for biomedical research and subsequently transformed into objects of Western psychiatric care. His work is located at the intersection of science and technology studies and medical anthropology and attends to the ontological politics of developing new pharmaceutical drugs through brain imaging and clinical trials more broadly.
Through his research, Maik aims to provide a postcolonial critique of contemporary “evidence-based medicine” and promote the development of more just and equitable healthcare technologies.