Andrea Petitt

Short presentation

My research interests revolve around how gender and intersectionality are co-shaped with multispecies relations. I am especially interested in the agricultural setting and how ideas around, as well as interactions with, cattle and horses shape are shaped by notions of gender and species. My methodological focus is on multispecies ethnography and I often work with hands-on participant observation. I also engage, and teach, artful research methods such as ethnographic poetry and analytical drawing

Biography

After a M.Sc. in "Africa and international development cooperation" at Gothenburg University (2007) and a M.Sc. in "Anthropology" from Université de Montréal (2010) I earned my Ph.D. in "Rural Development" from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) (2016).

The first M.Sc. thesis focused on policy incoherence of EU's agricultural trade and food aid in Ethiopia and the second M.Sc. thesis explored gender and work identity among the working cowboys in the Canadian west. My PhD thesis titled "Women's cattle ownership in Botswana - Rebranding gender relations?" looks into the dynamics of intersectionality between gender, class, ethnicity and race for women's relations to cattle in the Kalahari part of Botswana.

Between 2016 and 2022 I was employed as a researcher here at the Centre where I was involved in a project with an empiric focus on Sweden through the project - Changing Animal Bodies: Breeding Responses to Environmental, Economic and Social Pressures, funded through FORMAS

I then undertook a three year international post doc project funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) called "Global equestrian cultures in change: New gendered human-horse relations emerging from Western riding?"

Currently, I am working in the project titled HACAB: Human-Animal Collectives Assisting the Biosphere (2023-2027), placed at Université de Liège, Belgium. 

Research

Currently, I am working in the project titled HACAB: Human-Animal Collectives Assisting the Biosphere (2023-2027), placed at Université de Liège, Belgium. The HACAB research project is a multidisciplinary project (sociology, anthropology, communication studies) whose starting point is the following question: is it possible, at a time of global warming, to contribute to building political collectives that include all the subaltern beings who are primarily victims?

My previous project "Global equestrian cultures in change: New gendered human-horse relations emerging from Western riding?", funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and placed at here at CfGR, included a year of horseback ethnography on two working cattle ranches in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and is disseminated through a range of academic peer reviewed articles, ethnographic poetry and a book.

• Project page: "Global equestrian cultures in change"
• Profile page at Université de Liège
• Research talk: "The Multispecies Triad of the American West and beyond"