New Colleagues

September 2024

Drishti Mehta, PhD candidate

My research aims to simultaneously trace the mobilities of substance, people and distress. Substance abuse is increasingly becoming a priority in global mental health agendas whilst migration and displacement related vulnerabilities are exacerbating the mental healthcare needs of minority ethnic groups. My research thus focuses on the ways hazardous substance consumption gets embedded with the domestic worlds of a distinctly affected ethnic minority, British Indian-Punjabis.

Working against the grain of western psychiatry, my work renders hazardous substance consumption an anthropological-analytic through which enmeshments between socio-economic and migration-related vulnerabilities, domestic violence, and contemporary transformations in kinship and care can be examined.

In constructing a framework to simultaneously map the mobilities of peoples, cultures, substances, distress and social practices of care, my research also champions pertinent dialogues between mental illness’ clinical categories and lived realities, and mental health and migration.

Fatoumata Caterina De Marchi, PhD candidate

My name is Fatoumata Caterina De Marchi. I use she/her pronouns, and I’m not so straight. I’m a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology and an Islamic feminist anarchist activist (member of the Italian collective Sono l’unica mia.). My current PhD project focuses on Islamophobia in Western European societies (Belgium and Italy), and the ways it produces differentiated spatialities and temporalities for Muslims in urban contexts. Long story short: I am particularly interested in exploring the forms in which various communities defining themselves as Muslims contest, negotiate or adopt the dominant racial narratives concerning Islam.

Theoretically, I rely on critical race theory/anticolonial thought, Islamic feminism, Islamic anarchism, insights on the more-than-human in the anthropology of religion and in urban teory, and on the notion of world-making as defined by Maynard and Simpson (2022): the capacity of oppressed groups to imagine and build radical alternatives to colonial violence.

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).