Overview of FUTURES' researchers

Professor Anne K. Bang

Anne K. Bang's work has mainly focused on various forms of religious change (text/book circulation, reforms of ritual- and teaching practices), but also social, legal and political change. My work has been mainly been based on Arabic sources, combined with field work. She has also conducted projects for the digitizing and conservation of manuscripts and texts which are in private ownership and in danger of environmental degradation. 

Professor Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen has worked on violence and processes of state formation in Africa, more specifically in Mozambique. He has been concerned with various forms of socio-cultural dynamics relating to politics, cosmology and mobilization. His new research focuses on the future practices related to emerging urban formations in Africa and how these future cities—often privatized, enclaved or smart—prefigure global developments more generally.

Associate Professor Kerry R. Chance

Kerry Ryan Chance is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, and a Non-Resident W.E.B Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Kerry’s research examines the politics of urban ecology, particularly in South Africa and the United States. She focuses on different material elements – fire, water, air, and land – to analyze the historical practices and interactions that construct the intersections of gender, race, and class in everyday life.

Professor Annelin Eriksen

Annelin Eriksen has worked on Pentecostal forms of Christianity, mainly in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, but also on other social movements focussing on dramatic change. Her new research focuses on ideas of a "New Human Being" and immortality quests in Christian cosmology and transhumanist thinking.

Professor Randi Gressgård

Randi Gressgård has worked on urban diversity politics in Malmö, Sweden. She has focused on how ideas about the future are formed through policy discourses on social sustainability and security. In her ongoing research, she focuses on the shift from modernist approaches to security (based on prediction and control) to resilience politics in area-specific prevention policies targeting “vulnerable populations”, which involve notions of the future as truly uncertain (non-calculable) and failure as inevitable.

Professor Christine M. Jacobsen

Christine M. Jacobsen has worked for a number of years on gendered religious traditions, identities and practices among Muslims in France and Norway, in a context of international migration, globalization and secular modernity. Her current research uses temporality as an analytical lense to examine power relations and experiences in irregular migration.

Professor emeritus Bruce Kapferer

Bruce Kapferer is best known for his work on Sri Lanka, Australia and Zambia. He has been at the forefront of anthropological debate for over three decades. He was honoured with Huxley Prize in 2011 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. Kapferer studied at the University of Sydney and later for the Ph.D. at the University of Manchester and became part of the famous Manchester School of Anthropology working with Max Gluckman, Victor Turner, Bill Epstein, Elizabeth Colson, and J.Clyde Mitchell.

His early fieldwork was in Zambia where he researched among the Bisa of Lake Bangweulu and among mine and commercial workers in the town of Kabwe. His work from Zambia contributed to an analytical tradition of exchange theory but with a structuralist orientation. Working under Clyde Mitchell, he became an early pioneer of social network analysis. But later, following extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka, he shifted his focus to ritual demonstrating the importance of the phenomenology of aesthetics to the analysis of ritual performance.

He has since extended this interest to the interpretation of nationalism and its violence. His interest on nationalism was slowly linked then to research on the transformations of state structures that reproduce inequality, poverty, and violence. Much of Kapferer’s theoretical interventions comes from his articles mostly appeared in Social Analysis, the journal he founded in 1976 in collaboration with Kingsley Garbett and Michael Roberts. He was one of the editors of Anthropological Theory (until 2014) and remains on the Board. Kapferer established two anthropology departments in Australia (at the University of Adelaide and at James Cook University). He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Cairns Institute. Kapferer has also held professorial posts in anthropology at University College London (where he is now an Honorary Professorial Fellow) and at the University of Bergen, where he is currently Emeritus and until recently Director of the ‘Egalitarianism’ research program.

Oda Eiken Maraire

Oda holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from University of Bergen. Her research interests include urban anthropology, cities, infrastructure, aesthetics, inequality, materiality and gender. Her current PhD-project explores desires about home and property in affluent areas of Johannesburg, South Africa. The research investigates the dialectic relations between people and the material world as a means to understand how processes of enclaving work to transform urban structures and everyday practices. In order to examine the sociality dimensions of enclaving the study is specifically concerned with the materialities and aesthetics of 'home-making'.

Martin Eggen Mogseth

Martin holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo. His PhD project, which will be based on a fieldwork conducted in California, asks: “How do persons involved with assisted conception conceptualize genetic heredity?”. By asking this question, and by engaging with expert and non-expert persons alike, the problem of the physical reality of DNA and its constitutive powers emerge. This project is thus an ontological undertaking of the reality of genetic heredity.

Fartein Hauan Nilsen

Fartein holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen. His research interests include New Religious Movements, Science and Religion, Transhumanism, digital technologies and immortality. He is currently working on a PhD-project which aims to examine the growing field of “digital immortality” technologies. 

Stefan Ogedengbe

Stefan holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen. His research interests include medical anthropology, energy infrastructure, public health, and the environment. His ongoing PhD-project explores the connections between respiratory health and green energy transition.

Tomas Salem

Tomas holds a Master's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, and a Master degree in Samfunnssikkerhet (Societal Safety/Security) from the University of Tromsø. He has previously worked in the field of urban security, and have studied the process of reforming the military police in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Olympics. His current PhD-project focuses on the affective and aspirational dimensions of mountaineering in western Norway, and examines how people try to create happinness and well-being for themselves through regular immersions in the mountains.

Professor Knut Mikjel Rio

Knut Rio has worked on a wide range of issues in the Pacific; agriculture and ritual, kinship, economic forms, colonialism cultural heritage and witchcraft and sorcery. In his new research he will be investigating new social forms developing globally around money and wealth. This includes forms of cryptocurrencies as well as future bonds and sovereign wealth funds.

Associate Professor Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme's research interests are related to the relations between humans, animals and materials. Remme has conducted fieldwork in Ifugao, the Philippines, where he has studied animistic rituals, relations between humans, animals and spirits as well as conversion to Pentecostalism. Recently, Remme's resereach interests have turned towards environmental issues, particularly the various ways in which humans are entangled with oceans and marine life.

Anders Rubing

Anders Rubing is an architect and a Ph.D. candidate at SKOK. His project withsal the working title (Infra)structures of Security and Resilience at SKOK wishes to unpack how visions of different urban futures are produced by urban security- and resilience-discourses. Rubing is running Teori og Praksis, a platform to lift a debate around the built environment in relation to economy, politics, and lived life. He was educated at Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) where he finished with distinction in 2012.

Axel Rudi

Axel Rudi is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bergen, and a visiting researcher at Oxford University. He is the recipient of the Norwegian Research Council's mobillity grant, with the project Emic Sovereignties and Global Intersections, which investigates different ways of understanding sovereignty in Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, disentangled from its European, Christian and statist heritage. He completed his PhD in 2019, and is currently working on his first book. 

Professor Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard has worked on the urban indigenous, informaleconomies and cosmologies of landscape in the Peruvian Andes. In her newresearch she focuses on human-nature relations specifically with respectto environmental governance, property ownership, and the experimentationwith community forms in a context of climate change.