Natalia Magnani

About

Natasha is an an ethnographer, social anthropologist, and personal essayist who inquires into the practices of everyday life to illuminate processes of social and cultural transformation. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Anthropology Department of Harvard University, and is completing a PhD at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge.

Through both an academic and creative lens, she explores the interconnectedness of rootedness and movement, environment and memory, politics and material life. Drawing together ethnographic fieldwork from Fenno-Scandinavia to East Africa, her research focuses on the making of things to reveal the underlying mechanisms by which people creates ties to land and community. In complementary ways, her writing examines processes of memory and place making, especially through objects and their production.

The work has implications for indigenous and other social movements that seek tangible claims to land and identity. Addressing issues of transnational migration, displacement, and the growth of global economies, the work sheds light on social transformations associated with human movement and global connectivity.

I am a sociocultural anthropologist who takes creative refuge in writing, exploring how people seek transformative reconnections with the environment, land, and community as part of decolonial and environmental movements. In doing so I study resurgences of production—from the recreation of craft objects, local food ways, and their ecologies, to large-scale infrastructural revivals, all of which become entangled with wider politics of decolonization and climate change. Projects are ongoing with artisans in Indigenous homelands of Sápmi in Fennoscandia and postcolonial Cyprus, and with communities across the circumpolar North anticipating an Arctic Silk Road. More broadly, I am interested in the underlying mechanisms of social change—the ways that people seek to transform themselves and society through embodied and material practice. I received my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and currently work as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.

Contact me at natalia.magnani@maine.edu