New Colleagues

May 2024

Lee Gallagher, postdoc

I am an anthropologist whose research explores the lives of people affected by Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). As a researcher, I am deeply influenced by existentialist and phenomenological thought, and I am especially interested in how ideas drawn from these traditions might be used to enrich and broaden anthropological approaches to the study of critical illness, recovery and repair. In my PhD project, I used an ethnographic focus on everyday life at a small rehabilitation centre in the UK, to highlight the novel forms of community and mutual care that arise when head-injured people come together and support each other through the shared spaces and trajectories of rehabilitation.

I am extremely excited to be joining the Engaging Vulnerability research program at Uppsala university, where I look forward to developing my research interests in dialogue with the critical rethinking of vulnerability that the program opens up a vital space for. There is no question that the lives of TBI-affected people (and their family members) are saturated by vulnerability, but the question remains what type of vulnerability this consists of, and what these various forms of vulnerability might variously allow and disallow in their lives. These are precisely some of the questions that my research at Uppsala hopes to explore.

April 2024

Jennifer Lorin, postdoc

I received my PhD from the University of Paris Cité and most recently held a position as a lecturer at the University of Paris-Est Créteil. My dissertation focuses on the construction of making a king in southern Benin through an ethnography of the careers and daily activities of around forty kings/women-kings. Since 1990, across the African continent, we have been witnessing a ”Return of the Kings”. In Benin, this translates in a multiplication of royal claims. My research questions this process, particularly through the notions of usurpation and its corollary, legitimization. Holding power, conquering it, preventing its downfall, but also transmitting it, requires specific resources and compliance with multiple constraints, obligations, and prohibitions.

It is in this vein that in my postdoctoral research in Nigeria, I continue examining the constraints faced by Muslim Yoruba kings within the context of royalties intimately linked to the vodun religion. At the same time, I will be reworking my thesis into a book in English and French.

March 2024

Kristina Öhman, postdoc

I’m a PhD in ethnology and defended my doctoral dissertation, Ett tjejligt rum. Tidningen Starlet 1966-1996 (A room of her own. The Starlet magazine 1966-1996), in the fall of 2023. The focus of the dissertation research was how Starlet, a Swedish girls’ magazine, became a community and a space for the young readers, as well as a social medium before the internet.

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at UU, working on a project about the abandoned Sandträsk sanatorium in northern Sweden. With this project, I review the storytelling surrounding the sanatorium, specifically in regards to space, place, and folklore.

January 2024

Camelia Dewan, Associate senior lecturer

Dr Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on the anthropology of development. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University of London (SOAS/Birkbeck) and is an Associate Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University examining the socio-environmental effects of shipbreaking in Bangladesh. Dr Dewan is the author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press, 2021) and co-editor of two special issues: "Fluid Dispossessions: Contested Waters in Capitalist Natures” (Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology) and "Scaled Ethnographies of Toxic Flows" (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space).

September 2023

Jakob Löfgren, Associate senior lecturer

As a folklorist and interested in popular culture, my research interests lie within storytelling and folklore, often within popular culture. The common streak is the application of folkloric theory on contemporary material, which means one may end up (almost) anywhere. I've written about everything from fandom and bad vibes at work, to stories of boyhood, ceremonial playing and memes.

Mahmoud Keshavarz, Associate senior lecturer

I am a Docent in Cultural Anthropology and have engaged in a transdisciplinary research and teaching practice situated at the intersection of anthropology, design studies and critical border studies with a particular focus on the question of (de-)coloniality. My work addresses the violent yet imaginative capacities of materialities of borders and (im)mobilities. I have done ethnographic work on materialities of undocumented lives in Europe, practices of smuggling and border transgression, and colonial imaginaries of humanitarian design and innovation. I am author of The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor of Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (Pluto Press, 2022). Previously, I have hold teaching and research positions at Malmö University, Uppsala University, Stockholm University and University of Gothenburg in both anthropology and design studies. Between 2019 and 2022 I was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture. I am also co-founder of Decolonizing Design collective and Critical Border Studies Network.

Currently I am working on my next book tentatively titled Towards a Design Anthropology of Borders which is a visual-textual narrative of how borders and bordering practices are shaped by the materials, images, and technologies originated within colonial and liberal discourses and how they may shape in return bordered or no-border imaginations and worldviews, normalized or unsettled through technological consumption and use.

Metztli Sarai Hernández Garcia, PhD student

I am a social anthropologist who specializes in land-related affairs and indigenous rights, with an MA in environmental anthropology from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CEISAS). I’ve engaged in collaborations with both private and public institutions, contributing to the development of territorial programs and initiatives with a comprehensive and culturally sensitive approach in México and Peru. Currently, I’m a Doctoral student at Uppsala University as part of the C-urge project, investigating the repercussions of the Carbon Credit Market on the territorial rights of the Qom people in Formosa, Argentina.

Matias Menalled, PhD student

I studied Sociocultural Anthropology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina (2011-2017) and my Master in Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2018-2020). Between 2016-2018 and 2020-2023, I worked as a Scientific Application Specialist with orientation in Disaster Risk Management at the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional in Argentina.

Since September 2023, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden and a member of the C-URGE Doctoral Network of Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency (2023-2027) funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. My doctoral research focuses on technology and expertise in the urgency of drought in Argentina. The aim of this PhD project is to gain ethnographic knowledge about how water scarcity and drought are understood, framed and managed by different social actors in the Esteros del Iberá (Corrientes, Argentina) through an anthropological perspective.