Femke is a DPhil student in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research project concerns the global supply chain of brown shrimp and its divergent sites of production, circulation, and consumption. Brown shrimp are fished in Northern Europe by Dutch, German, and Danish fishers, after which they are trucked overland to factories in Morocco where they are manually peeled by female factory workers. Shrimp are then trucked back to Europe where they are sold to European wholesalers, restaurants, and supermarkets. Femke has conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco and the Netherlands and is now writing her dissertation titled: “Migrant Shrimp: Trajectories and Translations from Sea to Supermarket.”

More broadly, Femke is interested in how contemporary forms of global capitalism, such as the brown shrimp supply chain, are rendered part of ‘ordinary life’ through everyday actions. In her dissertation, she explores how (more-than-human) agency, response-ability and ‘matters of care’ are performed in the brown shrimp supply chain. She is interested in the cross-over between Science and Technology Studies, multispecies ethnography, ordinary ethics, and affect studies. 

Femke will be a visiting scholar at CEH from the 1st of September to the 15th of December 2023. During her time at here, she will be working on her dissertation, and she hopes to take part in various workshops and discussion groups.