Charlotta Widmark

Short presentation

Ph.D. and Senior lecturer in Cultural Anthropology. Director of Studies at the Advanced and Research Level in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology.

Biography

Research interests

In my research I have mainly been interested in issues concerning identity, power and social change. I have studied the Latin American democratization process with a focus on the relation between state and indigenous peoples, poverty, inequality and the intersections of gender, class and ethnicity. I am also interested in the anthropology of development and urban anthropology. My regional focus is the Andean region, mainly Bolivia and Peru.

Since 2021, I have been working on an interdisciplinary research collaboration with Universidad Mayor San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, funded by Sida. I am the Swedish coordinator for the project ‘Migration and the challenges of gender/identity dynamics and climate change’. The department is training two doctoral students within the framework of the project.

Since 2019 I am working on a project I call Social inequality, Spatialized Cultural Transformations and Life Trajectories. A Re-study of La Paz’s urban outskirts. During three months I re-visited the place where I did my fieldwork for the dissertation to see what has happened after 20 years in terms of social in/equality.

Within the interdisciplinary research node The good city – Urbanism and social change, where I was a research leader 2012-2015, we analyzed the conditions, forms, messages and meanings of cities in time and space. Together with master students we studied social and cultural processes of change in three European cities taking methods, and the concepts of space and place, and heritage as a point of departure, see http://www.histfilfak.uu.se/Godastaden/

During the period 2006-2012 I worked with a research project on the multicultural project and its consequences in Bolivia. The project focused on the question of under what circumstances the aims of multiculturalism are compatible with the aims of gender equality.

My PhD dissertation (2003) shed light on the processes of urbanization in Bolivia and gave a background to the difficulties of the processes of democratization. The study is based on fieldwork in the cities of La Paz and El Alto. I studied how Aymara-speaking migrants organized themselves and which social strategies they used in their strivings for a better life and social mobility.

Teaching interests

I currently supervise doctoral and master's students and teach advanced scientific writing. I am also responsible for the course “Professional Training in the Arts and Humanities” at the doctoral level. My previous teaching interests have included economic anthropology, anthropology of religion and basic scientific writing. I was also responsible for the "Introductory course", “Ethnography” and “Anthropology in Practice” at advanced level.