Andrea Behrends is Professor of Anthropology with a focus on Africa at the Leipzig University. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin in 2000. Her academic career has focused on long-term research projects, for instance on “conflict and integration”, “travelling models”, “oil and social change” and, most recently, “displacement, emplacement and aid in the Chad-Sudan borderlands”. One of her new projects looks at “Covid-19 in the African Drylands”. The project allows her to use her longstanding interest in collaborative methodologies to study the multiple effects of the pandemic. At the University of Bayreuth she is currently setting up a research group on “lifeworlds in crisis”. In the group, she and her team will be looking at the ways people live through so-called crisis situations by continuously and flexibly adapting knowledge and by actively engaging with new circumstances.