State, Care, Infrastructures
A political and economic anthropologist, Andréstudies the state in the global countryside, particularly relations that mediate and transform state-society relations: care, conflict, and infrastructures. His fieldwork-based M.A. thesis explored how in postcolonial Nigeria state-society relations were mediated through conflicts about the market on several spatial and temporal scales. With his PhD research, he transposed those interests to decentred Europe, where he has asked how state-citizen relationships in post-socialist Serbia are mediated by practices of care. As member of the research team that developed ‘stategraphy’, the relational anthropology of the state, he has proposed ‘strategic selectivity’ as a fourth axis of research (besides embeddedness, boundary work, and relational modalities). Particularly, he has investigated ‘economic care’ relations in the fields of local politics and infrastructure development, and ‘social care’ relations in the welfare field. Most recently, André has combined these interests with his earlier work on markets, embarking on an anthropology of the global commodity chains of agri-foods. He focuses on the multi-scalar governance of two ‘super fruits’ – raspberries and sea buckthorn – investigating the care and conflicts that go into the competitive infrastructuring of value by farmers, cooperatives, scientists, entrepreneurs, and states in Serbia, Latvia, and Germany.