Researchers

Ståle Knudsen

Professor Ståle Knudsen is head of the Social Anthropology department at the University of Bergen and the project leader for the Energethics project. Professor Knudsen has been researching the Turkish Black Sea fisheries for over 20 years, covering a variety of issues such as knowledge, technology, science, consumption, state policies, poverty and more recently social mobilizations as reaction and protest to the current massive construction of energy plants across Turkey.

Dinah Rajak

Dinah Rajak is a senior lecturer in Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include economic empowerment, enterprise and entrepreneurialism; and the role of big business in the political economy of HIV/Aids management. Her main focus has been on transnational corporations in development, corporate social responsibility and moral economy primarily on the extractive industries and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Siri Lange

Siri Lange is a senior researcher at Christian Michelsens Institute (CMI) with over 20 years of research experience from East Africa. She has a  particular interest in Tanzania where she has lived for a total of five years. Lange's interests include health, gender, cultural processes and natural resource management - with a special focus on political processes and participation at the local level. Under this project Lange will be looking at Statoil's recent investments in Tanzania and their CSR intiatives.

Tarje Wanvik

Tarje Wanvik is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of Bergen, and co-founder of the Spaces of Climate and Energy Laboratory. His research interests includes social investments and corruption, local effects of transnational CSR and service delivery in extractive hot zones. Wanvik's case study on Indonesia will constitute a part of his research project “Mobility and the Politics of Place – tensions and transactions between corporations and communities in the global economy”.   

Lena Gross

Lena Gross is a PhD candidate at the Social Anthropology department at the University of Oslo, researching the influences of the Alberta oil/tar sands industry on different local groups. Her PhD  is titled: "The Good Life and The Oil Industry: Stories of «the good life» in Alberta, Canada" and is part of Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s project on «Overheating. The three crises of globalisation».  Gross’ interests lie with resource and nature management, social change, power relations and minority languages.

Synnøve Kristine Nepstad Bendixsen

Synnøve Bendixsen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Anthropology department at the University of Bergen. She is affiliated with the “Denaturalizing difference: Challenging the production of global social inequality” project.  Her research interests include irregular migrants, Kurdistan Iraq, political mobilization, Islam and Muslims in Europe, social inequality and religious identification. Bendixsen will look at what expectations DNO relates to when investing in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ragnhild Freng Dale

Ragnhild Freng Dale is a PhD candidate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include social movements, physical theatre, arctic social science and material culture studies. Her current research concerns the values at stake in the development of large-scale extractive projects in Northern Norway. She will be looking at the case of Hammerfest which has experienced drastic change the last 10 years due to two petroleum projects run by Statoil and Eni Norge.

Ingrid Birce Müftüoglu

Ingrid Birce Müftüoglu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Anthropology Department at the University of Bergen. She holds a PhD in Ethnology (UiB) and has been doing research within various fields, such as the Women's movement in Norway and Atatürk's monuments in Turkey, as well as working as a senior advisor at The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education (SIU). Her research interests include social movements, Turkey, Nordic Corporate Model, renewable energy and CSR.

Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Iselin Åsedotter Strønen is a social anthropologist currently working as an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen and a Postdoctoral researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI). Strønen holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, titled "A Revolutionary Petro-State. Change, Continuity and Popular Power in Venezuela." Her research interests include the social politics of natural resource management, grass root democracy, social movement, poverty reduction and state transformation.