Mario Schmidt

Background

About Mario Schmidt

I have a PhD in social and cultural anthropology with over 10 years post-doc experience. I would describe myself as an economic anthropologist interested in a wide range of topics from local classification of monetary amounts, the experimentalization of development aid, gambling, labor migration, and notions of masculinity. My intimate knowledge of Kenyan society is based upon over 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Western Kenya, Nairobi, and other parts of the country. I lived over a year in a western Kenyan village and was lucky to call Pipeline, a high-rise settlement in Nairobi, my home for close to three years. I also conducted fieldwork in other places of Kenya such as Naivasha and Machakos as well as in the United States of America. Furthermore I observed lab-in-the-field as well as lab experiments and RCTs in a behavioral economic NGO, and designed and implemented one lab-in-the-field experiment in Homa Bay County (on temporal discounting) and one lab experiment at the NGO Busara (how do different quantitative compositions of money affect spending decisions) for which I have also offered advice on how to create an ethically more just working environment. I am highly familiar with both the urban and rural Kenyan context with regard to economic livelihood strategies, decision-making processes from the level of households to local politics, and recent transformations of gender relations well as sociological, anthropological, and political scholarship on Kenya. Additionally, I have experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, and monographs, have taught dozens of classes on a wide variety of topics, organized academic conferences, workshops, and summer schools, and have succesfully applied for over half a million Euros in third-party funding.