Dr Annika Lindberg
Small Group Project 2022-23
Observing, theorizing and coping with ‘nothing’ in ethnographic fieldwork
With Bagga Bjerge & Mike Rowe & Tobias Eule
This project will engage with the awkwardness that appears when we observe, hear, and research nothing. In doing so, we will address the methodological, ethical and political challenges of ethnographic research and its limits. In focusing on activity, do we risk misrepresenting our fields of study? By excluding inactivity from our representations, do we fail to fully grasp the activities which we set out to study, the object of our study? We argue that these questions are significant as a tool for better understanding and contextualising the object of study, the activities intended for research.
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Biography
Annika is a Researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg and School of Social Work, HES-SO Valais. Her work focuses on European detention and deportation regimes, bureaucracy, and state violence, and draws on anthropology of the state and critical border studies. She is the author of Deportation Limbo: State violence and Contestations in the Nordics, which offers an ethnography of Sweden and Denmark's regimes of encampment and incarceration of non-deported people, and co-author of Migrants Before the Law, a collective ethnography of bordering in Europe. Her current research engagements include a project on the geopolitics of deportation, on the one hand, and on the other, educational and research initiatives challenging borders and their inherent violence.
Biographical details correct as of 20.04.26