Annika Rabo Professor emerita

Annika Rabo is professor emeritus. In 2008 she became professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University after having worked as an associate professor at Linköping University, as a researcher at the Swedish Research Council, and at the Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic relations – CEIFO – at Stockholm University. Annika Rabo received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology in 1986 after completing a thesis on the political and social effects of a gigantic irrigation scheme along the Euphrates in northeast Syria. After her first anthropological field work she has, since the late 1970s, worked on a number of research projects in Syria, but also in Lebanon, Jordan and Sweden. One individual project in the late 1980s focused on perceptions of development in Jordan and Syria, and – from the late 1990s – focused on traders in Aleppo, and between 2005 and 2009, one project focused on Syrian debates about family law reform, and another on family and family law among transnational Syrians. Between 2005 and 2009 she was in charge of a multidisciplinary project on teacher education in Sweden. Between 2011 and 2013 she led a project on future citizens in educational texts and in policies, with cases studies from Lebanon, Sweden and Turkey with researchers from these three countries. In the same years she collaborated with professor Erik Olsson in a project on service and welfare in transnational space focusing on Assyrians/Syriacs in Sweden and on Swedes in southern Spain.

Together with physical geographer Ulrik Mårtensson and agronomist Lazhar Gammoudi, Annika Rabo has worked in the Formas-supported (2017-2018) project “Time and development in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia.”  They investigated traces and memories of a development and land reclamation project in central Tunisia, where Swedish and Tunisian young researchers, and Tunisian agronomists and rural development agents were engaged in collaborative work between 1982 and 1993.he prolonged crisis in Syria has made Annika Rabo return to questions of agriculture and subsistence. Together with professor Bengt Karlsson at the Department of Social Anthropology she edited a book about the entanglement and interrelationship between humans and seeds. She is also following traces of Syrian seeds to Lebanon and Morocco.

Annika Rabo is also engaged in COMPACT, a multidisciplinary European network with more than a hundred members researching conspiracy theories. The network is financed by COST from spring 2016 to 2020 (conspiracytheories.eu). 

Analyses of categorizations and systems of classification, and analyses of the state, bureaucracies and policies as well as state-citizen relationships have been central in her work. She is also interested in analyses of language and power.