Laurin Paul Rudolf Baumgardt

Laurin Baumgardt is an urban anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher investigating architectural productions and building politics in South Africa. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Rice University. Funded by awards from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, his long-term ethnographic research focuses on housing design and building politics, infrastructure and development, and urban activism within the context of Cape Town’s entrenched socio-spatial segregation. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles, blogs, and book chapters on a wide range of anthropological, architectural, urbanist debates and concepts. He also holds a degree in Philosophy and African Studies which he earned at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and has studied and taught at the University of Florida, University of Chicago, and Stellenbosch University. Education Cultural Anthropology | 2018 – 2025 Rice University Anthropology | 2013 – 2017 Leipzig University Center for Critical & Cultural Theory (3CT) | 2018 – 2021 Rice University ResearchCurrent Research Fields Urban Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Architecture and Design, Theory and History, Housing Justice, Social Movements, Critical Infrastructure and Development Studies, Materiality, Future Studies, African Urbanism, South Africa Teaching & PhD Courses Architectural anthropology AR-405 This course introduces key anthropological debates and methodological approaches that are concerned with architectural productions, knowledge, and design practices. Awards Graduate Student Paper Prize Critical Urban Anthropology Association 2024 Expanding Horizons Fellowship Rice University 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Research US National Science Foundation 2022 Dissertation Fieldwork Grant Wenner-Gren Foundation 2021 James T. Wagoner ’29 Foreign Study Scholarship Rice University 2020