Hege Høyer Leivestad
Hege Høyer Leivestad

Telephone: +46 (0)8 16 26 84
E-mail: hege.leivestad@socant.su.se
Room: B652

Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Leivestad also works as a Researcher in the ERC funded project PORTS at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. She has previously been Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science and Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Oxford. She is the author of the monograph Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury 2018), which was the first in-depth study of mobile dwellings and caravans in Europe. Her current book project The Port: Life and Labour at a Maritime Crossroads, is based on extensive fieldwork in a Spanish container port.

Academic interests

Mobile materials and infrastructure, Economic Anthropology, Logistics and Labour, Maritime Industries, Homes/Housing

Research

Hege Høyer Leivestad’s research has focused on mobile materials and infrastructures, and more recently on ethnographic perspectives on global capitalism. Leivestad has also been engaged in interdisciplinary research projects on migration and the environment. Høyer Leivestad has published on issues of mobility theory and methodology, homemaking and social class, logistics and shipping, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, particularly Spain. During her doctoral research she investigated mobile homes, campsite living and housing infrastructure among British and Swedish caravan dwellers. The monograph Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury 2018) offers a novel take on the relationship between housing, mobility and class in a European context. Høyer Leivestad has communicated research results in more than fifty media interviews in Sweden, Norway and Spain including on national television, radio and in newspapers.

With the ongoing research project Frontier Freight: Maritime Logistics at the Strait of Gibraltar (funded by the Swedish Research Council’s International Postdoc Grant) she investigates port infrastructure, maritime labour and logistics in the Port of Algeciras Bay in southern Spain. The project explores logistics – both as a field of study and an analytical concept – by ethnographically engaging with a critical transport node in the global shipping industry. Based on fieldwork in a European container port at the borders of Europe, this project contributes to ongoing debates in anthropology concerning labour, logistics and the global economy.

Hege Høyer Leivestad will from April 2021 also be engaged in the ERC funded project PORTS, led by Dr. Elisabeth Schober at the University of Oslo. «Between Sea and City: Ethnographic explorations of infrastructure, work, and place around leading urban container ports» deals with the world's most central container ports and the cities they are embedded in (Ports - Department of Social Anthropology (uio.no)

Selected publications

Books:

  • 2018 Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe. London: Bloomsbury. Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe - 1st Edition - Hege (routledge.com)
  • Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs: Shaping Industries, Creating Professionals (with Anette Nyqvist). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Articles:

Book Chapters

  • 2018. “Caravan Cultures: Second Homes on Wheels”, in Routledge International Handbook on Second Homes, (eds) Michael Hall and Dieter Müller. London: Routledge.
  • 2017. “Beyond Informality: Intimacy and Commerce at the Caravanning Trade Fair”, in Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs: Shaping Industries, Creating Professionals, (eds) Hege Høyer Leivestad and Anette Nyqvist. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • 2017. ”Individuals and Industries: Large-Scale Professional Gatherings as Ethnographic Fields” (with Anette Nyqvist and Hans Tunestad), in Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs: Shaping Industries, Creating Professionals, (eds) Hege Høyer Leivestad and Anette Nyqvist. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • 2017. “Inventorying Mobility: Methodology on Wheels”, in Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment, (eds) Alice Elliot, Roger Norum and Noel Salazar. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  • 2016. “Motility”, in The Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements. (eds) Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram. Oxford: Berghahn.

Research networks

Media

Hege Høyer Leivestad has been interviewed in a range of Swedish and Norwegian newspapers, national radio and TV. A selection of media appearances is available on the Swedish website.

Information about past activities can be found in the Department’s previous Annual Reports.