Members

Manimala Chanu Asem

Manimala is a PhD-candidate in Social Anthropology. Her project looks into the impacts of displacement from water-to-land, while trying to understand the lake-ecosystem among a displaced indigenous community in Loktak Lake of Manipur, one of the northeastern states in India and where I also come from. It will further enquire about involved actors in their everydayness and the structure and functionality of power in a fluid-contested-space. The project contributes to water-based thinking and ethnography of water-people in general.

Marianna Betti


Connor Joseph Cavanagh


Anwesha Dutta

Anwesha is a postdoctoral researcher at CMI, Bergen. Her work looks at the intersection between violent conflict and biodiversity conservation. She also works on issues of protected area creation, forest restoration projects and green militarization and understand the implication of such processes for local indigenous communities, mostly using a political ecology approach.
 

Osmund Engelbregt Bøhmer Grøholt

Osmund is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology focusing on industrial heritage, local preservation practices and land use management. Currently, he is conducting long-term fieldwork in and around Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site where he explores how different actors (e.g. local authorities, institutions, grassroot organizations, and UNESCO) make use of and relate to heritage in different ways. Osmund is also interested in how various infrastructures are part of, and can be conceptually useful to analyse, heritagization processes.
 

Idunn Lullau Holthe

Idunn is an anthropologist with research experience from East Africa and the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, and has worked for two years on climate change adaptation and vulnerabilities at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu. Beyond this, she is interested in topics such as inequality, religion, cultural heritage and sustainability. Idunn is currently working as a research assistant at the Department of Social Anthropology at UiB and for the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP).
 

Isabelle Hugøy

Isabelle is a PhD-candidate in Social Anthropology. Her project focuses on soil as a key dimension to explore what kinds of knowledge dynamics arise in efforts to make the agricultural sectors in Norway and Costa Rica carbon neutral. The project is inspired by, and a further development of, her MA research which explored the relationship between visualism, practice, and knowledge in context of ecological alteration, through the specific case of the disease coffee leaf rust in Costa Rica. Her research interests include knowledge, power, ecology, climate and energy issues, CSR, and agribusiness.
 

Ståle Knudsen

Ståle’s recent and planned research focuses on the role of transnational energy corporations and explores tensions between responsibility and financial logics as this is negotiated at the interface between corporations, states, international institutions, civil society, and local communities. While this recent work concentrates on Norwegian corporations, previous work since the early 1990s has been based on long-term fieldwork among fishers, managers, and scientists in Turkey. This research covered issues such as knowledge, technology, science, seafood and consumption, introduced species, state policies, poverty, and common pool resources. Running through all this work is the vexing issue of identities. Between 2004 and 2013 he was involved in interdisciplinary EU-funded work related to the management of European seas, and from 2015-2019 headed the project Energethics that explored how Norwegian energy corporations handle CSR when they operate abroad.
 

Asbjørn Madsen

Asbjørn is an anthropology student at the University of Copenhagen, and currently an intern at the Department of Social Anthropology at UiB. His main interests lie within political anthropology, environmental social movements and ways of engaging with nature among Danish youth. As part of his education he has carried out short projects on Extinction Rebellion in London, young people’s engagement with nature in and around Copenhagen, and (landscape)-architectural attempts to ‘re-wild’ urban space.
 

Jose Gilvan de Melo

 

Ragnhild Overå

Ragnhild is Professor and human geographer mainly working in Ghana and other African countries. Her research interests include gender, entrepreneurship, informal economies, food and nutrition security, small-scale fisheries, fish markets, land conflicts, petroleum industry, natural resource management, migration and sustainable urban development.
 

Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme

Jon Henrik is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology. His research grows out of a general interest in human life as fundamentally entangled with nonhumans. He has previously studied this through investigating relations between humans, animals and spirits in Ifugao, the Philippines. Recently, Jon Henrik’s research has revolved around the material politics of recreational lobster fishing in Norway, including human-material-marine relations as they are enacted in ghost fishing. Parallell to this, he works on climate change and its implications for relations between humans and marine life in Maine, US.
 

Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Iselin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology. She has done research in Venezuela, Angola and Brazil, focusing on, among other issues, natural resources, inequality and poverty, gender and CSR.
 

Nils Haukeland Vedal

Nils is a PhD-candidate in Social Anthropology. He conducted his MA fieldwork in the Peruvian high jungle, where he lived and worked with the Awajun people, who are part of the Jivaro linguistic family. Nils' previous research focused on women horticulturalists, their rituals, mythological narratives, kinship relations and the social world they exhibit. His PhD project further investigates these themes.
 

Aled Williams

Aled is a political scientist using political economy and ecology approaches. He works on corruption, neoliberal environmentalism, hyper-capitalist growth in Indonesia/Southeast Asia. Aled is currently finalizing a PhD at SOAS University of London: a political ecology of REDD+ in Indonesia, with fieldwork on Sulawesi.  

Edwige Yekple

 

Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

Cecilie is Professor in Social Anthropology. Her research interests include popular economies, neoliberalism, gender, extractivism, cosmologies, and conceptualizations of nature in the Andes. Her recent research focuses on post-mining transition(s) and the re-making of the Svalbard archipelago into a climate frontier showcase, exploring the dismantling of a mining community, the “returning to nature”, and the management and re-use of mining remains.