Stefanie Lemke has been a professor and director at the Institute of Development Research (IDR) since the beginning of April 2021, her inaugural lecture and ceremonial welcome to BOKU took place on March 28.

 

You can watch the recording of her inaugural lecture here.

You can watch a video introduction of Stefanie Lemke here.

Why are we not succeeding in eliminating hunger? We produce enough food worldwide to feed everyone, yet hunger and food insecurity have been on the rise again since 2015. This is exacerbated by the Corona crisis, the war in Ukraine, conflicts in other crisis regions, and the climate crisis with its consequences. At the same time, the number of overweight people worldwide is rising dramatically - across all age groups, with serious consequences for health and public health systems. Stefanie Lemke works with human rights-based approaches that focus on the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition. This includes strengthening the legal position of disadvantaged groups, especially women. Among other things, this involves participation and co-determination with regard to access to land and other natural resources. "We need a broad social transformation to change prevailing gender roles and achieve social justice. In research, we can make an important contribution by accompanying and documenting participatory processes, in close collaboration with local actor groups."

 

Stefanie Lemke's research is located at the interface between the natural and social sciences; both approaches were already equally represented in her studies of home economics and nutritional sciences at the Weihenstephan Campus of the Technical University of Munich. Africa has long been one of the focus regions of her scientific investigations. For her dissertation "Food and Nutrition Security in Black South African Households - Creative Ways of Coping and Survival", she conducted research in South Africa, which had only recently overcome the apartheid regime. This was accompanied by major upheavals in society; apartheid and other discriminatory laws had almost completely destroyed traditional forms of agriculture. "At that time, I was mainly concerned with the fact that the black African population often had to cope with very little money due to the disadvantages caused by history, and what effects this had on the food situation. Household structures and cohesion within families, especially the participation of women, played a crucial role."

 

In her habilitation at the University of Hohenheim, Stefanie Lemke included another aspect: the human right to adequate food. "Such a right provides a normative framework as well as concrete instructions for action and methods to address the structural causes of malnutrition or nutritional deficiencies and to develop approaches to solutions," she emphasizes. While working on her habilitation, she took on a substitute professorship at Hohenheim, and in 2015 she moved to Coventry University, where she held the permanent position of "associate professor" from 2019. The BOKU call immediately appealed to her: "The combination of research topics at the institute - food security and development issues on the one hand, learning methods and learning processes in development work on the other - fits well with my transdisciplinary and participatory research approach." She wants to complement this with gender research, the intersectional perspective and the human rights approach.


07.06.2022