Rachel Runesson

About Rachel Runesson

I am a Swedish-Canadian PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies. My project (begun in 2024) looks at the process of heritage production in the context of coastal stone age traces in Europe. Using audio-visual as well as traditional anthropological methods, I follow material from archaeological excavation to museum display to understand how this heritage is produced through an ebb and flow of human-material relations. This Marie-Curie project forms part of a broader doctoral network ArCHe – Archaeological Coastal Heritage: Past, Present, and Future of a Hidden Prehistoric Legacy, spread across Latvia, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Estonia, and France.

Background

I completed my undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (2017-2021), and my masters in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester (2021/2022). The film I made as part of my masters thesis was screened at Toronto International Women’s Film Festival (2023), the German International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF, 2024), as well as at guest lectures at McMaster University, Canada, and the University of Manchester, UK.

Academic Interests

Currently, I have focused interests in materiality, heritage and past-present-future constructions, futures anthropology, and storytelling. I am also very interested in the use of more-than-textual methods of conducting and expressing ethnographic fieldwork, such as filmmaking, audio-recording, drawing, spoken word and written poetry, and other literary expressions of the field.