Profile
Alev Coban is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurt. In her PhD “Postcolonial Bodies, Machines, and Affects – The Promises and Performances of Technology Development in Kenya”, Alev examined the working conditions in makerspaces and other places of hardware innovation in Kenya. She highlights what affective and socio-material practices are demanded from places, bodies, and machines that are marked as technologically ‘catching-up’ and therefore as peripheral to global technology development. Alev argues that making technologies in Kenya entails collaborative and loving work between co-workers, machines, and material, but also strenuous efforts of positioning within workplace hierarchies, technocapitalism, and colonial legacies.
Alev holds a B.A. in African Development Studies of Geography (2011, Bayreuth) and a M.A. in Geographies of Globalization: Markets and Metropolises (2014, Frankfurt am Main). Furthermore, she completed an advanced training in Design Thinking at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam. For her PhD, Alev was funded by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung. Since June 2018, she works as a research assistant at the Department of Human Geography in Frankfurt.
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Alev Coban Arbeitsgruppe Boeckler Institut für Humangeographie Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6 coban@geo.uni-frankfurt.de |
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