The PhD Blog

Denne blog er en platform, hvor afdelingens ph.d.-studerende inviteres til at skrive om deres erfaringer og indsigter fra deres forskning. Bidragene inkluderer perspektiver på både de store og små spørgsmål i antropologien: antropologisk feltarbejde, analyse, teori, forskningsetik og repræsentation. Det er op til den enkelte ph.d.-studerende at bestemme emnet, så gå på opdagelse. Du finder også en oversigt over afdelingens nuværende og tidligere ph.d.-studerende.

Hvis du er ph.d.-studerende på afdeling for antropologi, er du meget velkommen til at bidrage her på siden og få din profil offentliggjort her også. Sen en mail til communitas@cas.au.dk.

This blog is a platform for PhD students to communicate their experiences and insights from their research. The contributions include perspectives on both large and small questions in anthropology: anthropological fieldwork, analysis, theory, research ethics, and representation. It is up to each PhD student to decide what stories they wish to tell, so explore! You will also find an overview of the department's former and current PhD students.

If you are a PhD student at Department of Anthropology you are very welcome to contribute here and have your profile published in this page. Send an email to communitas@cas.au.dk.

The PhD Students | Department of Anthropology




Image

Harmandeep Kaur Gill

When the first Tibetans escaped into exile in 1959, they hoped to return to Tibet within a few years. However, today they find themeless growing old in exile. Elderly Tibetans lead lives often characterized by uncertainty, partly due to their status as 'refugees' but particularly due to the large in-migration in recent years of Tibetan youth to 'western' nations. This has left many elderly alone in the last phase of their lives.

My PhD project explores the experiences of old age among Tibetans in light of these shifting circumstances and is titles: "Things Fall Apart: Coming to Terms with Old Age, Loneliness and Death Among Elderly Tibetans in Exile India".

My PhD project is part of the larger inter-disciplinary project "Aging as a Human Condition: Radical Uncertainty and the Search for a Good (Old) life", which is a collaboration between anthropology, philosophy, and art and it is based at Aarhus University.




Image

Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard

I am a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, who works on queer activism, ethics, and moral community. I do fieldwork in Amman, the capital of Jordan. I am interested in how we imagine future possibilities for our bodies, genders, and sexualities in contexts that do not really afford them. I ask how moral community is imagined in liminal and marginal situations and spaces, and what this can teach us about community more generally.

My research project is part of the wider project at Aarhus University;  "Ethics after Individualism".




Image

Edwin Ambani Ameso

I am a PhD student in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (Anthusia) project. I focus on the health security aspect of the project. I examine the politically charged utopian order, which sets out to achieve Universal Health Coverage in Kenya.

I look at the birth and experimentation with social health insurance schemes and social protection programmes at a national and sub-national levet. I tie this to transnational organisations, WHO and the World Bank, who are the at the front line of these ambitious projects in the global south. Through household and clinically based ethnographic settings, I interact with health providers and seekers to explore these political ambitions.




Image

Chiara Bresciani

My PhD project focuses on social change, temporalities, historicities, and tradition in an indigenous region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico. I have been conducting long-term fieldwork in this area since 2010, where I also did research on alcoholism and community electrification




Image

Katrine Mandrup Bach

I have been a PhD student at the Department og Anthropology since 2018. I am working on a project on alternative heritage initiatives in Egypt. I investigate how this work is changing the understandings of 'heritage' in the Egyptian context. These initiatives also touch upon discussions of urban and colonial heritage and nostalgias for the future all set up against the massive construction projects undertaken by the Egyptian state.



Image

Samwel Moses Ntapanda

I am a PhD Fellow in Social Anthropology at University of Oslo interested on social-cultural and economic entanglements of waste. I am a visiting PhD student with the Department of Anthropology at AU in the spring 2020. Currently I am writing my PhD thesis on informal innovations, scavenging, repurposing, urban mining and economies that arise out of electronic waste in Tanzania.



Image

Charlotte Christiansen

Since 2018 I have been a PhD student at the department of anthropology, Aarhus Uni­versity. I have conducted fieldwork in different cities in Denmark, primarily Aarhus, Middel­fart, and Copenhagen. I am mostly interested collaborative methods, embodiment, aesthetics and exploring intersections between literature and anthropology. My PhD dissertation is about young people with mental vulnerabilities in Denmark and their experiences of participating in a shared reading group program.

The PhD project is part of a wider project at Aarhus University, situated at Interacting Minds Center, called From Participant to Reader Leader: A human laboratory for literature and social intervention.




Image

Camilla Brændstrup Laursen

I have been a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology since 2017. My project focuses on guts, gut trouble and the diagnostic category of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Based on fieldwork in two Danish gastroenterology clinics and in the homes of people diagnosed with IBS, I explore the experience, theorization and everyday management of ambiguous gut sensations.

I analyze IBS as a highly prevalent, irritating problem in the context of the Danish welfare state, and I explore interacting biological, social and cultural circumstances in relation to gut trouble. My primary theoretical sources of inspiration are phenomenology and sensorial anthropology.




Image

Abir Mohamad Ismail

I am a PhD student at the department of anthropology, Aarhus Uni­versity. In my article-based PhD project, I explore the relationship between elderly care, gender, generations and religiosity in Arab Muslim families in Denmark.

My recent publications includes Food as care and friction in late life: marginalization of Muslim immigrant families in the Danish welfare state and Care in practice: Negotiations of elderly care in multigenerational Arab Muslim families in Denmark. The PhD project is part of a wider project at Aarhus University, entitled AISHA: Aging immigrants and self-appointed helper arrangements, funded by the VELUX foundation.




Image

Cæcilie Kramer Kildahl

How might anthropologists engage in discussions on anthropogenic climate change, toxic environments, biodiversity loss, sustainability and ‘green transition’ through the perspective of industrialized large-scale farmers and their crops? This is roughly the scope of my PhD research project, which I initiated in September 2020 as a PhD student enrolled in the 4+4 scheme.

Since 2020, I have done fieldwork amongst conventional farmers in mid-west Jutland. Here I explore the interlink between farmers’ moralities, field aesthetics and farming practices in order to unpack how ‘green’ policies and sustainability trends are contested and resisted in the everyday life of farmers, both by human and more-than-human agencies. This raises questions of the relation between policy making and ‘real life’ implementation and why, sometimes, change simply does not happen.




Image

Johanne Tarpgaard

I am PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, working on a project on marine plastics pollution in the South Western Part of the Pacific Ocean. I am specifically interested in taking anthropology to and under the sea, looking at the multispecies stories and entanglements that are at stake around plastics. Entanglements with both indigenous knowledge, scientific knowledge production and the ocean itself.

The project combines multi-sited participant observation and interviews with natural science fieldwork methods in order to grasp and understand the complexities of ocean plastics pollution. My PhD project is part of the research project BLUE: Multispecies Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis.