Karin AhlbergPhD
About me
Karin Ahlberg is a social anthropologist, who received her PhD from SOAS, University of London in 2017. Before joining the department, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Her PhD thesis examines entanglements between tourism, statecraft and national image curation in the context of contemporary Egypt. For the thesis, she conducted twenty months of fieldwork in Cairo in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. Ahlberg’s new research project explores the afterlife of the Suez Canal and Lessepsian migration from a more-than-human perspective. In parallel, she is turning her dissertation into a book manuscript with the title Brand New Egypt.
Research interests: Egypt, the Middle East and the Mediterranean | More-than-human studies, Lessepsian/marine species migration, the Suez Canal | Politics of tourism, tourist workers, statecraft, national image curation, marketing and the politics of information | Revolutions, aftermaths and anthropological knowledge production
Current research projects:
BIOrdinary: Biodiversity dilemmas in ordinary places
The environmental afterlives of the Suez Canal
Research
Case study as part of the BIOrdinary research project on Emergent Ecologies in the Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is undergoing one of the world’s largest marine transformation. The Suez Canal, dug to shorten the route between East and West, has become a “highway” for tropical marine species (jellyfish, rabbitfish, crustacea and algae), in search of new habitats.
