We are pleased to announce that Annika Capelán, who received her PhD from Lund University (Sweden), is a new recipient of a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Global Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF-GF).

Annika’s Marie Sk?odowska-Curie fellowship is hosted by CEH in collaboration with Aarhus University’s Anthropology Department and the University of Cape Town. Her postdoctoral project will be supervised by CEH director Heather Anne Swanson and Lesley Green, professor of Anthropology at the School of African and Gender Studies and director of the Environmental Humanities South program of the University of Cape Town. Annika will begin her project in January 2022 and will be based in South Africa during an initial outgoing phase before returning to AU full-time in 2024.

Annika’s fellowship project, titled “Wool Worked Worlds”, investigates how local conditions shape the global wool industry, and how local sheep farming and landscape management methods may be both connected with and disconnected from geographically remote areas of the wool industry. She will conduct fieldwork on Patagonian (South America), South African and Australian grasslands with sheep farmers and other practitioners who engage with wool, such as workers in spinning facilities and lab technicians who measure the quality of the fibre.

Located at the intersection of visual and environmental anthropology, Annika uses film making both as a research method and as an analytical tool. This approach implies thinking through key challenges of developing a narrative perspective that works across the globe and the local, in addition to diving deep into the specificities of each region’s wool production, creating a collaborative patchwork of geographically spread narrative voices.

The project proposes that understanding the wool industry can enrich general knowledge of how commodity production and colonial history affects the environment and contribute to the debate on global views and situated knowledge. It is also Annika’s hope that by addressing situated and multi-vocal notions of environmental concern, her project will speak to the growing call for environmental awareness, in Denmark, in Europe and beyond.

Annika previously visited CEH for short research stays in October 2019 and February 2020, with funding from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: Margit Althin Foundation, and we look forward to her return to CEH – this time for a much longer period. If you are interested, please follow the news on our website or sign up to the newsletter to see when she will be giving a talk on her project.