Sarah Green is the leader of the Crosslocations project, and is a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki, with a specialism in the anthropology of Europe, and most particularly the Balkan and Mediterranean regions. She has worked on issues related to the anthropology of space, place and location for most of her academic career. The idea for Crosslocations developed from many years of working on the anthropology of borders and frontiers. You can contact her via sarah.green@helsinki.fi.
Laia Soto Bermant is a Post Doctoral researcher working for Transit, Trade, and Travel project. She earned her doctorate from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she held a postdoctoral scholarship at the School of Transborder Studies in Arizona State University, and a lectureship at Bournemouth University.
She has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Morocco since 2008, and she has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean – particularly, in the connections and disconnections generated between the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco since the time of Al-Andalus (711-1492 AD). In Trade, Transit and Travel, she explores the relative location of a Spanish exclave located in northeastern Morocco: the city of Melilla, under Spanish sovereignty since the late 15th century and part of the Schengen space since the early 1990s. This research is linked to the ERC project on Cross-locations, but it is an independent project funded by the Academy of Finland. You can contact her at laia.sotobermant@helsinki.fi.
Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki is a social anthropologist currently working on the Greek economic crisis. She has conducted long term ethnographic fieldwork in a soup kitchen, a clothing bank and a social clinic in the Northern Greek town of Xanthi. Her PhD thesis (University of Manchester) looks at emergent forms of collective and egalitarian sociality, engendered by the economic crisis, and their links with the state, the market and the domestic sphere.
In the past, Phaedra pursued a research interest on Islamic charity, and its significance within Turkey's shifting sociopolitical landscape. Phaedra holds an MA and MRes in Social Anthropology (University of Manchester) and a BSc in Psychology (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is also a member of the Early Career Researchers' Editorial Board of the Sociological Review. You can contact her at phaedra.douzina-bakalaki@helsinki.fi.
Viljami Kankaanpää-Kukkonen started in Crosslocations as a PhD researcher in August 2018. He studied anthropology and evolutionary biology at the University of Helsinki, acquiring a multidisciplinary expertise that he is now putting to use in his research project for Crosslocations. Before his PhD, he has researched importation of rescue dogs from Russia to Finland for his MA thesis, Finnish family reunification process for Bodies of Evidence -research project and studied host-pathogen interactions between ants and fungi for The Centre of Excellence in Biological Interactions.
For his PhD, he will study beekeeping in Spain and how the relations between the beekeepers, the environment, and the bees are mediated spatially by multiple scientific, legal, economic and social logics that change the relative value of different locations where beekeeping is practiced. He will start his fieldwork in Spain during the autumn of 2019. You can contact him at viljami.kankaanpaa@helsinki.fi.
Marion Lecoquierre is a geographer and a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Helsinki and Academy of Finland (2020-2023). She has been conducting extensive fieldwork in Palestine and Israel since 2011.
She holds a MA of geography from Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (2008) and earned her PhD degree in Political and Social science from the European University Institute (Florence, 2016). Her thesis, entitled “Holding on to place, spatialities of resistance in Israel and Palestine” looks at the spatial repertoire of local struggles in Jerusalem, Hebron and al-Araqib, scrutinizing practices and representations of contention. She has since then been awarded several postdoctoral grants by the French Research Center in Jerusalem (CRFJ), the French Institute in the Near East (IFPO) and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme (FMSH) to work on religious territorialities and the geopolitics of cities in Palestine and Israel.
Her current postdoctoral research is entitled “(Cross)locating Hebron: how multiple intersections make the city”. You can contact her at marion.lecoquierre[at]helsinki.fi.
Samuli Lähteenaho began work as a PhD researcher for Crosslocations in January 2017. Before his PhD project, he studied anthropology at the University of Helsinki, during which he developed a research interest in the Levant region. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon since 2015, when he carried out his MA thesis project on young residents of Beirut, exploring how they come to a sense of their relative location in the city and beyond. He earned his MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Helsinki in 2016.
For his PhD he is exploring how notions of public and private space and perceptions of the environment shape the relative location of the Beirut coastline. You can contact him at samuli.lahteenaho@helsinki.fi.
Carl Rommel is a social anthropologist with a specialism in contemporary Egypt. He has lived in Cairo on and off since 2007, and conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Egyptian capital between 2011 and 2013. He is currently working on a book project that traces transformations within the emotional politics of Egyptian football before and after the 2011 Revolution.
Carl completed dual degrees in Sociotechnical Engineering and the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University between 2001 and 2007. After a year of Arabic Studies in Cairo, he moved on to SOAS, University of London, where he earned his MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies (2009) and PhD in Social Anthropology (2015). After graduating, he has held research fellowships at Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern. You can contact him at carl.rommel@helsinki.fi.
You can read more on his academia page for more on his work.
Patricia D. Scalco is a social anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher within the Trade, Transit and Travel project under the Academy of Finland. She earned her PhD from the University of Manchester and her doctoral research, currently being transformed into a monograph, explored the role of sexual moralities in the delineation of private and public spaces in contemporary Istanbul. Under the TTT project, she will further explore constructions of space and place in the area of the Grand Bazaar, in Istanbul.
Patricia has lived and conducted extensive fieldwork in Istanbul since 2006, earning her MA in Social Anthropology from Yeditepe University. She is an Early Career Researcher member of the Editorial Board of the Sociological Review and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Turkey. A dual citizen of Brazil and Italy, Patricia holds a degree in Law and is affiliated with the Brazilian Bar Association. You can contact her at patricia.scalco@helsinki.fi.
Joseph J. Viscomi completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in 2016. In addition to his affiliation with the University of Helsinki, he holds a lectureship in modern European history in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Joseph’s primary research interests are in migration, geopolitics, decolonization, and historical consciousness in the modern Mediterranean. Additionally, he is interested in questions of methodology and the philosophy of history. His first manuscript, tentatively entitled, "The Migrant Mediterranean: Imperial Afterlives between Italy and Egypt,” explores how Italian residents in Egypt (a community that numbered roughly 55,000 on the eve of the Second World War) and the political actors around them anticipated, experienced and remembered their departures from Egypt and arrivals in Italy in relation to contemporary historical events. The manuscript moves through and demonstrates the connections between different scales of social, legal, and geopolitical history in the twentieth-century Mediterranean. His writing builds on archival, oral-historical, and ethnographic research that has been supported by a CES-Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies, a Fulbright, and by the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Currently, Joseph is working on several publications related to this research. For Crosslocations, he is developing a project that studies the social, political, and environmental conditions of depopulation in towns in Calabria, Italy. This project, focusing primarily on Petrizzi (provincia di Catanzaro), extends from the earthquake that rattled Calabria in 1783 to the destructive floods of 1973.
His teaching interests cover modern and contemporary Italian, European, and Mediterranean historiography and ethnography. You can contact him at joseph.viscomi@helsinki.fi
You can also read more on his Academia page.
Lena Malm (Photographer): Lena has been working as a professional photographer since finishing her studies at ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York in 1993. She has also learned graphic designing while working at the Swedish language weekly Ny Tid in Helsinki, Finland; and has since also worked as a graphic designer. She was the photographer of the COST project EastBordNet, which resulted in the book Borderwork. In 2013 she founded her publishing house Jasilti. Visit www.jasilti.com for more on Lena Malm and her work.
Philippe Rekacewicz is a geographer, cartographer and information designer based in southern Norway. He earned his diploma in geography from the University of Paris-Panthéon-Sorbonne and worked at Le Monde diplomatique from 1988 to 2014 where he co-authored five geopolitic atlas (2003, 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2013). Between 1996 and 2008, he also headed the cartographic department of GRID-Arendal, a delocalized office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). He now co-administrates the site visionscarto.net with Philippe Rivière which began in 2014.
His field of research includes issues related to population circulation (migration, refugees, forced displacement and borders). He is presently working on several socio-geographic projects on perception and representation of borders and territories, and production and management of public and private space. He is keenly interested in the relationships between cartography, art, science, and politics. Since 2006, he has participated in cartographic-artistic projects in a number of European countries. Eventually, he is currently conducting a participative research on how to develop an « experimental cartography ».
For more information about Philippe's work, please see visionscarto.net