Annika Capelán has been awarded funding by the Margit Altin foundation, managed by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, for postdoctoral research and international exchange, which will allow her to be affiliated with the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University for four months in Fall/Winter 2019. Annika completed her PhD in the Anthropology Department at Lund University in 2017 and has also been affiliated with Deakin University in Australia.

She gave CEH a taste of her upcoming work in her lunch seminar on April 26^th, titled Fibre Interferences – A comparative study on how landscapes may be ‘woolworked.’  According to Annika, the main question of her project is: “How can wool – an ancient and still globally present material – help us understand the dynamics, effects and possible futures of co-species landscape-making in the Era of the Anthropocene?” Her purpose is “to provide insights that contribute to a more detailed understanding of landscape-making by attending to the historical, political, industrial, social and inter-species relationships involved in producing and processing woolen fibre.”

This postdoc project is a continuation and extension of her PhD dissertation Fibre Formations – Wool as an Anthropological Site, in which she focused on wool production in Patagonia, a part of the Southern Cone of South America and conducted fieldwork in labs, with sheep farmers, with artisans, indigenous groups who work with wool or farm the sheep.

Her new work will expand her research through additional field research in Australia and a new comparative perspective. As Annika explains: “When I did that field work, people would have Australian wool as a reference. When I did field work with [indigenous] Mapuche farmers in Patagonia, they would know what Australian wool is, what it is like, and how the soil of Australia is for wool. They would have information about Australia, which is a remote place to them, but there would be links from them to Australia. So my interest in doing research and field work in Australia as well came from learning that they know a lot about Australian wool.”

In Australia, Annika will also specifically look into issues of land ownership and colonialism from the early days of sheep farming to today, in addition to doing field work of a similar nature to what she did in Patagonia. On a shorter return trip to Patagonia, Annika will further examine land ownership issues in connection with sheep farming there, as well.