Renita Thedvall Head of department, Associate Professor

Renita Thedvall is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology. Her research is based in the field of policy and organizational anthropology, with special focus on the anthropology of bureaucracy. She has a particular interest in the way policies are shaped and presented in the form of models, indicators, and standards, and how these aspects are understood and performed. Her research projects have centred on employment policy, working life, and social issues. She has conducted field studies in the EU and Fairtrade International, and in municipal social service offices and preschools, where she has studied EU bureaucrats, standards setters, social workers’ and preschool teachers’ work developing, and struggling to understand, implement, and perform policies.

As a part of her research, she also investigates meetings both as ethnographic objects and as sites of ethnographic inquiry. Together with Jen Sandler, she has explored this topic through an edited volume, Meeting Ethnography. Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development and Resistance (2017, Routledge).