Medical anthropology

Visual approaches

Youth

Health services

Health communication

My work focuses upon the anthropological aspects of the implementation of international human rights standards - especially indigenous peoples rights - for the most marginalized populations, and how these take shape at global, national and local levels. I have been working with hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa (the San) since 1998, with a particular focus on how they approach issues of education and land rights, and the intersection between these issues.  I also link the question of Indigenous Rights to land, knowledge, and culture with global concerns including climate change, biodiversity, and food security. 

Current and Recent projects:

Community Asset Mapping Study - Tsumkwe District, Namibia (2024 - ongoing). Funded by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF)

FAO Indigenous Food Profile - Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia (2024). Funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) International Office (Rome)

Hunter-Gatherer Education in a Changing World (2023-2024).  Applied Working Group funded by the Cultural Evolution Society Transformation Fund https://ces-transformationfund.org/our-projects/hunter-gatherer-education-awg/

Networks: 

Research and Advocacy Group on Hunter Gatherer Education (HG-EDU):  https://www.hg-edu.org/

Réseau de Recherche et de Connaissances Relatives aux Peuples Autochtones https://reseaudialog.ca/

Justice and Indigenous Peoples (JUSTIP) https://justip.hypotheses.org/jennifer-hays

More-than-human perspectives, domestication, relationbuilding between man-bird-environment, enactment of culture- and nature-relations, marine and coastal management, visual anthropology, science studies, ecosystem services

Researcher COREPLAN – Integrated coastal resource management and planning – ecosystem services and coastal governance Lead: NOFIMA Ann Magnhild Solås, post doc position linked to 3 WPs. 2016-2018

PhD- fellow The Nordland birdcare – interfaces of texts and practices in inscribing the Vega Archipelago as World Heritage, Thesis & film: “To think like a bird” (2015). https://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/8457

Her visual anthropological research focuses on efforts to modernise Traditional Chinese medicine and their implications on the relationship between species used in Chinese medicine and technologies that enable different ways of seeing the medicine. 'Following the herbs' she uses visual and graphic methodologies to communicate how people (doctors, pharmacologists, researchers in medicine and ecology, landowners, industry managers and workers) mediate this relationship in China, where Chinese medicine is institutionalised on a national scale, and in Europe, where transnational networks work to enable Chinese medicine on a much smaller, scattered scale.

Economic and Environmental Anthropology, Northern Societies.

Key research interests: Perspectives on nature - traditions, relationships and practices. Moral Economies, formal/Informal economies, food, hunting, values-value.

Art as critical, creative modules in research and dissemination.

My research focuses on processes of memory, belonging, and Indigenous representation and politics, especially as they occur through material, infrastructural, and environmental relations.

I currently lead the Norwegian Research Council project Arctic Silk Road: Imagining Global Infrastructures and Community Boundaries in Sápmi and the Russian North, which follows the social lives of railways, ports, and northern sea route infrastructure linked to Asia and global trade across Norway, Finland, and Russia.

From studies of craft making and infrastructural development in Sápmi, to land demarcation in East Africa, I write about the embodied ways that people experience cultural change. In doing so, I seek to illuminate how bodily practice can be harnessed to achieve social transformation--both individually and in society at large. See my website for more details.

I am involved in several projects.

First, I am leading the JPI-funded, “ArcHeritage: Commodification, Identity, and Revitalisation in the Anthropocene”, with partners at the University of Aberdeen (David Anderson) and University of Groningen (Maarten Loonen). The project explores the commodity chains of three iconic heritage artefacts in the Arctic: reindeer antler, the conical tent, and walrus ivory. We trace the oral histories and new market and social entanglements of these artefacts across several sites in Sápmi, Canada, and Greenland, linking them to historical pastoralist and hunting lifeways and their transformation over time. In recent years, each artefact has taken a new form within the heritage and tourism industries: reindeer antler as Traditional Chinese Medicine, the conical tent as a fixed tourism dwelling, and walrus ivory as souvenir carvings. They thus tell a wider story of Arctic heritage and the relationship between indigenous producers, consumers, and the market.

For this, I am also leading a Network Project "Heritage making in the Arctic", as part of the Thematic Network on Circumpolar Archives, Folklore and Ethnography (CAFE), funded by UArctic: https://www.uarctic.org/activities/thematic-networks/circumpolar-archives-folklore-and-ethnography-cafe/

Second, I am a researcher in the project, "Arctic Silk Road: Imagining Global Infrastructures and Community Boundaries in Sápmi and the Russian North", led by Dr. Natalia Magnani. This is a project funded by the Research Council of Norway, which follows the imagination of global infrastructures across time and space. We focus on experiences of planning and anticipating constructions along the Arctic Silk Road from China across the Circumpolar North—in Sápmi, along the northern Russian coast, and other connected sites. Furthermore, we examine comparative cases of large-scale infrastructural networks historical and emerging.

For this, I am a Visiting Research Associate at the Arctic Studies Centre at Liaocheng University in China (http://en.asclcu.cn/).

Third, I am writing up the results of an AHRC-funded project: “Imaging Minority Culture: Photography, Digital Sharing, and Cultural Survival in Northeast China” (2017-2019). This was a project to research a previously unseen and recently digitised photographic archive of two ethnic minorities in northeast China: the Ethel John Lindgren Collection of Evenki and Orochen communities at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge. The project used the photographs as tools during ethnographic fieldwork amongst contemporary Evenki and Orochen communities, identifying locations, landscapes, and material objects to better understand everyday social life during this formative period in pre-communist China. In addition to working with communities and co-curating an exhibition, the project also documented the process of digital repatriation and sharing and explored their uses by community and state actors in the context of surging interest and investment in 'protecting' minority heritage and culture.

Finally, I am completing a book project: “Skill, Social Change and More-Than-Human Relations in Postsocialist Northern Mongolia”, based on my PhD fieldwork and currently under contract with University of Amsterdam Press.

Northern Norway, West and Central Africa (Cameroon, The Central African Republic, Mali)

Migration, Clandestine refugees, urbanisation,  Boko Haram, the conflict in the Central African Republic, the Anglophone Crisis

Visual Anthropology,  Collaboration and inclusive visual methods

Local community dialouges

Research as collaboration