Telephone: +46 (0)8 16 32 02
E-mail: eva-maria.hardtmann@socant.su.se
Room: B650
Office hours: By appointment

Eva-Maria Hardtmann is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology. She is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies for the Advanced Level and the PhD programme at the department. Her research areas include social movements, citizenship, transnationalism, gender, and power relations. She specializes in South Asia, mainly India and Nepal.

In her current project, Hardtmann studies the prison abolition movement in the United States. The focus is on two generations of released women who are active in transregional networks in New York, Louisana and California. The study follows the activists to gain an insight into their views on society, the state and market economy, but also to understand how experiences in everyday life have an impact on their activism, and conversely how activism is expressed in everyday life. The study contains a component of comparison with the prison abolition movement in the Nordic countries (mainly Sweden and Norway) when activists were most active during the 1960s to 1980s, but also with similar activism among contemporary released women in Sweden. The project is mainly based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, but also includes archive material and autobiographies of women in the networks. The study is positioned at the intersection of social movement research, prison studies and gender studies and intends to make contributions to these research fields.

Hardtmann’s former project followed activists in chosen network in South Asia and Japan. She focused on their daily work and everyday practices to create and uphold transnational networks across nation-states, within the Global Justice Movement. The project included fieldwork in World Social Forums in India, Brazil and Kenya. The aim was to contribute to a better understanding of processes, when activists in movements, involving different categories of people with varied focuses and with origin in different parts of the world, create networks between their respective movements. The study was also an attempt to study internal power-relations within social movements. The research was funded by RJ (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and the outcome was presented in the monography South Asian Activists in the Global Justice Movement (OUP 2017).

In previous research Hardtmann has focused on the Dalit movement, a transnational movement with a base in India. Her fieldwork was carried out mainly in northern India, but also among Dalits, who had immigrated to Great Britain. The research was funded by RJ (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the outcome was presented in the monography Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (OUP 2013 [2009]).

Membership on Boards

Hardtmann is member of the board at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She has been member of advisory board in the project ‘Outlook in Civil Society’, a collaboration between Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, SIDA and Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. She has been member of board of SASNET (Swedish South Asian Studies Network), and coordinator of SARI (Stockholm Anthropological Research on India, member of board of SSAG (The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography) and member of board of Forum for Feminist Research at Centre for Gender Studies, Stockholm University.

Teaching 2021

  • SAM226, Key Themes in Social Anthropology (master level), lecturer and course coordinator, 15 credits
  • SAM250, Political Matters in Anthropological Perspective (master level), lecturer and course coordinator 7,5 credits
  • SAM214, Individual tutorial (master level, theoretical preparation for master thesis), supervision and course coordinator 7,5 credits
  • SAM212, Master thesis, supervision and course coordinator, 30 credits
  • PhD thesis, supervision

Selected publications

2021

  • Hardtmann, Eva-Maria. (forthcoming).  “Dalit Activism and Transnational Mobilization”. In Jules Naudet and Surinder S. Jodhka (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Caste, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2017

  • South Asian Activists in the Global Justice Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2016

  • “Transnational Dalit Feminists In Between the Indian State, UN and the Global Justice Movement”. In Kenneth Bo Nielsen och Alf Gunvald Nilsen (red.), Social Movements and the State in India. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Hardtmann, Eva-Maria, Vincent Manoharan, Urmila Devi, Sabrina Francis and Jussi Eskola. ‘A Dialogical Writing Experiment between Scholars, Activists and Activists/Scholars: The Tensions and Joy of Writing Together’. In Helena Wulff (red.), The Anthropologist as Writer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2012

  • ‘Introduction. Social movements in a neoliberal era: Ethnographies of local activists in transnational networks’. In Heidi Moksnes and Mia Melin (eds), Global Civil Society: Shifting Powers in a Shifting World, Uppsala: Uppsala University, CSD.

2008

  • The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (Reprinted in paperback, sixth edition, 2013).

2005

  • “Les Dalits Indiens sont Soudainement Partout! La création de nouveaux réseaux internationaux alternatifs”. In Anthropologie et Sociétés, vol. 29, no 3, 2005: 97-122.
  • “Daliterna I den globala rättviserörelsen: Buddhism och socialism på Internet”. Chakra no. 3.

2003

  • “Our Fury is Burning”: From Local Practice to Global Connections in the Dalit Movement. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, vol. 54.

2002

  • “In Touch with Politics: Three Individuals in the Midst of the Dalit Movement”. I Eva Poluha and Mona Rosendahl (eds), Contesting ‘Good’ Governance: Crosscultural Perspectives on Representation, Accountability and Public Space. London and New York: Routledge Curzon.

2001

  • ”Motståndsrörelse mot kastväsendet: glimtar från Indien och England”. In Ulf Hannerz, (ed.) Flera fält i ett - Socialantropologer om translokala fältstudier. Stockholm: Carlssons.

Popular Science

Hardtmann has in collaboration with the Indian Library in Sweden edited two Swedish popular science volumes about Dalits (so-called untouchables) in India. In one volume "The story on my back", fictional texts by Dalits have been translated into Swedish. In the second volume "This country that was never our mother", Swedish translators and poets have interpreted Dalit poetry and the volume is illustrated by the Indian artist Savi Sawarkar.

2006

  • Hardtmann, Eva-Maria and Vimal Thorat in collaboration with Tomas Löfström and Birgitta Wallin (eds). Berättelsen på min rygg. Indiens daliter i uppror mot kastsystemet [The story on my back.] Stockholm: Ordfront.

  • Hardtmann, Eva-Maria and Vimal Thorat in collaboration with Tomas Löfström and Birgitta Wallin (eds). Detta land som aldrig var vår moder. Dikter av indiska dalitpoeter och bilder av Savi Sawarkar. [This country that was never our mother. Poetry by Indian Dalit poets and illustrations by Savi Savarkar] Stockholm: Tranan.