Habitable Air

  • habitableair@uib.no
  • University of Bergen | 5007 Bergen, Norway

PROJECT TEAM


RESEARCHERS

Kerry Ryan Chance

Project Leader

Kerry Ryan Chance, Principal Investigator (PI) of the Habitable Air project. As a Professor at the University of Bergen and Marie Curie Fellow, she conducts research on urban ecology and the cultural dynamics of climate change in South Africa and the U.S.  She is the author of Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands and her work has been featured in various academic journals. Her upcoming book is Habitable Air: Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate Change.

Sharad Chari

Senior Researcher

Sharad Chari, Associate Professor of Geography at UC-Berkeley, and affiliate at WiSER, South Africa. His research combines geography, Marxism, and Black Studies, with a focus on South India, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Author of multiple books and numerous articles, his work includes Fraternal Capital, Apartheid Remains and Gramsci at Sea. He is the Co-editor of Other Geographies and Ethnographies of Power.

Laurence Ralph

Senior Researcher

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology and director of Center for Transnational Policing at Princeton University. His research combines urban and medical anthropology, focusing on gangs, disability, masculinity, race, and popular culture in the U.S. He is the author of multiple award-winning books, including Renegade Dreams and Torture Letters.

Courtney Morris

Senior Researcher

Courtney Morris is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, researching critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements, and race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is the author of a forthcoming book, To Defend this Sunrise.

Charlotte Bruckermann

Senior Researcher

Charlotte Bruckermann is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Institute for Ethnology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research centers on environmental and economic anthropology, digital ethnography, and comparative and global approaches in anthropology, with a focus on China and Germany. She is the author of Claiming Homes and co-author of The Anthropology of China.

Kefiloe Sello

Post-doctoral Fellow

Kefiloe Sello is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen under the Habitable Air Project. Her research focuses on a mining town of Sasolburg, South Africa. This ethnographic research seeks to gauge how miners, riddled with silicosis, continue to live in the area despite the poor air quality. The research also seeks to show how extractive industries are responsible not only for climate change but also for vicious circle of poverty within communities they are found. Kefiloe is a recipient of the Margaret McNamara Education Grant and the Wenner Gren Foundation.

Wesley Maraire

Project & Communication Manager

Wesley Maraire has an MPhil in labour law from the University of Cape Town. His doctoral research focused on access to justice and dispute resolution. He brings with him to Habitable Air, experience from management consulting and market research covering diverse sectors including tourism, retail, ICT, and non-profit organisations.

Dara Kell

Filmmaker

Dara Kell is a South African filmmaker and writer. She is currently making a documentary about civil disobedience in America, her previous film, Dear Mandela, won multiple awards. Her work has been featured on PBS, Netflix and more. She has also produced a podcast about women in climate justice.

Stefan Ogedengbe

Ph.D. Researcher

Stefan Ogedengbe is a Ph.D. student under the Habitable Air Project at the department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research examines medical anthropology, urban inequality, ecological degradation, and preservation in urban and rural landscapes, specifically in South Africa. His Ph.D. project is an ethnography of asthma and industrial toxicity, air pollution, and climate change.

Felix Lussem

Ph.D Researcher

Felix Lussem is a Research Assistant at the University of Cologne, Germany. His research addresses shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” in Germany with a regional focus on Rhineland’s lignite mining area. He is the author of Alienating “facts” and Uneven Futures of Energy Transition.

PROJECT AFFILIATES

Jé Judson

Project Affiliate

Jé Judson is a Research Scientist with the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE) at the University of Minnesota. Her research interrogates cultural support for policing and police violence, examining the social acceptance of punishment and the normative discourse and practice of anti-Blackness and misogynoir. She is interested in the accumulative effects of violence exposures over the life course and the health impacts of vicarious trauma.

Mareike Winchell

Project Affiliate

Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, and how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with climate change. Her first book, After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022), traces the ways Quechua people in central Bolivia call upon and actively repurpose the past in their efforts to navigate legacies of labor subjection and sexual violence. Winchell’s writing and digital scholarship have appeared or are slated for publication in numerous journals, including the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Critical Times, Bolivian Studies Journal, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Her research and writing have received generous funding from the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, UChicago's Center for International Social Science Research, and UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Sibahle Ndwayana

Ph.D. Researcher

Sibahle Ndwayana is a Ph.D. student at the University of California-Berkeley, His dissertation aims to reorient Blackness within Black Geographies and Black Studies by focusing on a geosonic understanding of Cabo Verde, he examines how sound plays a role in the spatial (re)production of Cabo Verde, including how sound shapes and is shaped by racial capitalism and colonialism.

Adam Hassan

Ph.D. Researcher

Adam Hassan is a Ph.D. student at the University of California-Berkeley, studying the digital and material geographies of cryptocurrency mining and how it is changing relationships between communities, the state and energy infrastructures, particularly in Lebanon.

Katja Müller

Project Affiliate

Katja Müller conducts research into digitisation, museum studies, material culture and visual anthropology, as well as energy and environmental humanities. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and received the Heisenberg funding for 'DigitalEnergy' research in Digitisation and Energy Transitions. Her latest books include 'Digitisation and Low Carbon Energy Transitions', ‘Beyond the Coal Rush’, and ‘Digital Archives and Collections’, analysing digital technology's impact on energy systems, the coal rush in Germany, Australia and India and online access to heritage material in India and Europe. 

Fadeke Castor

Project Affiliate

N. Fadeke Castor (she/they) is a Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with research and teaching interests in religion, race, performance and the intersectional politics of decolonization. She is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018). Their writings can be found in Cultural Anthropology, Fieldwork in Religion, Tarka, The Black Scholar and other leading journals. Their current research focuses on an exploration of the spiritual ontologies and epistemologies of Black spiritual praxis as shifting our centers of being and ways of knowing towards collective care, healing, and social transformation.

Major Eason

P.h.D. Researcher

Major Eason is a PhD student in Sociology. His research interests are broadly centered around environmental justice and sustainable development. Namely, he looks to garner a place based understanding of how environmental racism – racial inequality in the environmental quality and sustainable infrastructure of communities –  manifests through the analysis of a space’s land development and cultural patterns.

Major earned his BA from Swarthmore College, where he double majored in Sociology and Economics and was a Mellon Mays Fellow. As a fellow, he embarked on a project that built off of Robert Bullard’s landmark case study of environmental racism in the East Little York section of Northeast Houston. Drawing off the 1983 study, which originated from community protests against the Whispering Pines Landfill, Major used historic census tract data and interview data to understand demographic shifts,  community relationships, and residents’ sense making around the environmental hazard in their neighborhood.

Laurie McIntosh

Project Affiliate

Laurie McIntosh is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of migration, governance, and moral experience in contemporary Europe. Her work examines how state policies and cultural practices shape experiences of belonging, citizenship, and care across different populations. She is currently completing her book manuscript Living Together in Uncertainty: Difference and Ambivalence in the New Norway, which explores the politics and uncertainties of race, immigration and multiculturalism in Norway. Her research interests include the anthropology of Europe, global migration and ethics, gender, citizenship and governmentality, with particular attention to how extremist political sentiment becomes mainstream and the epistemology of global aging.McIntosh is affiliated with the Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard, where she is working on an examination of elder northern Europeans who migrate to Spain for retirement and medical purposes, considering the cultural politics of aging and how care and citizenship shape concerns about economic decline and the welfare state. She is also investigating the increased militarization of the southern European border and the policing and detention of asylum-seekers in Spain. Her work contributes to broader conversations about difference, ambivalence, and the social experience of uncertainty in contemporary Europe.

ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Advisory Board Member

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and the Academic Director of the Holberg Prize. He has previously served as the Executive Director of the Global Research Program on Inequality. Bjørn’s research focuses on politics, protest, violence, egalitarianism, and questions of urbanity in Africa and more globally. Along with numerous articles, he has published several books on these topics.

Ajantha Subramanian

Advisory Board Member

Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor at Harvard University. Her research interests include political economy, ecology, colonialism, space, citizenship in South Asia, including the South Asian Diaspora. She authored Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India and The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India.

Christine J. Walley

Advisory Board Member

Christine Walley is a Professor of Anthropology at MIT whose work explores environmental conflict and industrial transformation. Her first ethnography, Rough Waters (2004), examines conservation and development in coastal Tanzania. She co-created the Exit Zero Project, a multimedia exploration of deindustrialisation in Southeast Chicago, which includes an award-winning book (2013), a documentary (2017), and an interactive website developed in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. Walley is currently working on a new book, Notes from a ‘Paraindustrial’ Age.