Social Anthropology research
Anthropological research at the School of Global Studies builds on a tradition of detailed empirical fieldwork. At the core of our research are lived life, everyday praxis, and the workings of power.
About our research
We practice an anthropology built on comparative and reflexive analyses that adds new understandings of the familiar as well as the unfamiliar. Our empirical fieldwork includes methods such as long-term participant-observation; textual, visual and archival research; interviews; elicitation techniques; and collaborative methods such as digital mapping and photo-narration.
We carry out both basic and applied research. Our work addresses classical theoretical problems within anthropology such as the boundaries between persons and things, waste and value, the sacred and the secular, social organisation and the formation of subjectivities, as well as contemporary social issues related to migration, integration, climate change, precarity and collective action.
Anthropologists at the School of Global Studies conduct research in urban and rural settings in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North, Central and South America.
A sample of current research questions are:
- How does global neoliberal capitalism affect economic opportunities, social relations and cultural imaginaries among groups ranging from subsistence farmers in the Venezuelan Andes to urban factory workers in south China, to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?
- How are climate change and other environmental challenges understood and managed by squatters in Jakarta, indigenous people in Peru and Bolivia, and urban Swedes?
- How do global religious movements create new sensibilities, practices, and transnational networks in settings from Kuala Lumpur to rural Java to Luanda? Specific projects spanning topics from witchcraft and legal pluralism to religious wars and the social life of spirits.
Contact:
Current research projects
Our current research projects are presented on the page Ongoing research. Please click the link below.
Completed research projects in Social Anthropology
- EPI - Everyday Practices of Integration (External link)
- Mining for Tourists in China (External link)
- Staying (with) Things: Alternatives to Circular Living and Consuming (External link)
- Portuguese migrants in Mozambique: Portuguese migrants in Mozambique: Postcolon… (External link)
- Indigenous People and Climate Change in the Andes (External link)
- Indigenous People and Climate Change – conflicting epistemologies in Latin Amer… (External link)
- Re:heritage - circulation and marketization of things with history (External link)
- Circular economy in the Swedish public sector (External link)
- Crossing therapeutic borders: Sickness and Healing in the Somali Diaspora (External link)
- The Cosmopolitics of Mountain Offerings in the Peruvian Andes (External link)
- Negotiating Water Values and Water Rights in Peru’s Highlands (External link)
- Problem gambling and economic crime in the workplace (External link)
- Environmental disaster and civic responses in Angola (External link)
- Assessing the Angola-Namibia border in the age of environmental and sanitary di… (External link)