Birgit Pauksztat

I am an Associate Professor (docent) at the Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. Prior to this, I was an Assistant Professor at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland (2011-2015) and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich in London, UK (2015-17).

I have a PhD in Sociology from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (2010), and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cologne, Germany, and from the University of California, Irvine, USA. I have worked at the British Museum in London, UK, both as researcher in the North America collections with a focus on projects related to the North American Arctic (2000-2001, 2004-2005), and as a curator for the Zayed National Museum project (2010-2011).

My research interests are in the areas of social network analysis and organizational behaviour. My current research concerns the role of social relationships for dealing with problems at work in different organizational settings.

Another important focus of my research is on work-related and informal social interactions on cargo vessels, and on seafarers’ strategies for coping with job demands. Building on these interests, I organized (together with Dr. C. Pekcan and Dr. M. Barnett) the Visby Maritime Symposium, held 10-12 October 2018, in Visby, Sweden. Selected papers from the Symposium have been published in a special issue of Marine Policy; the introduction with links to the articles is available here.

Current project: Seafarers' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Together with colleagues at the University of Queensland (Australia), Royal Holloway University of London (UK) and the World Maritime University (Sweden), I collected survey data on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on seafarers. The aim was to understand how the pandemic affects seafarers who are currently on board of international commercial ships, in order to identify factors that may help crews in the future. Please follow these links to the project report and the first publications from the project (Marine Policy, 2022; Safety Science, 2022; International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health; Work, 2022).