Ulrik Jennische

Junior Global Horizons Fellow, SCAS.
Ph.D. Social Anthropology, Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Score

Ulrik Jennische is a social anthropologist at Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Score. His
dissertation, Small-Small: Moral Economy and the Marketspace in Northern Ghana, was based on an
ethnographic fieldwork among small-scale traders in northern Ghana. Specifically, he analyzed the moral
dimensions of the state-driven formalization process through, among other things, studying future imagi-
nations of young Ghanaians. He is the author of “Divisive Democracy, Urban Trade, and Small-Small
Politics in Northern Ghana” (Kritisk Etnografi 2019), which shows how small-scale traders create a
sense of belonging and community in response to a polarizing democratic process. More recently,
Jennische’s research has focused on how imaginations and assumptions of the future have become an
object of political interventions. Together with Professor Adrienne Sörbom, he has written “Governing
Anticipation: UNESCO Making Humankind Futures Literate” (Journal of Organizational Ethnography 
2022) that critically investigates UNESCO’s development of the Futures Literacy Laboratory that attempts
to educate humankind in its ability to read the future. 

At SCAS, Jennische will commence a new research project exploring the increasing importance of the
financial market and stock exchange in the Ghanaian development process. The project aims to situate the
financial market as a political field in which the state acts to lead the country into a future of opportunity
and sovereignty beyond aid-dependency and debt, and to understand the role of anticipation in this political
field. Projections, visions, scenarios, forecasts, and other future imaginaries are cultural artefacts that can
serve as entry points to studying various forms of power in the intersections of futures knowledge, global
capitalism, governance and development.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.