AMBER
Please note that if you are interested in working on issues of amber extraction and trade in the Baltics some funding for fieldwork might be available through the AMBER project. Please contact the PI, Alessandro Rippa, in advance if you are interested in this opportunity.
Infrastructure development in Asian borderlands
Asian borderlands are witnessing tremendous changes, partly as the result of growing infrastructure projects funded by the People's Republic of China under its Belt and Road Initiative. New highways and special economic zones are not only impacting patters of mobility and trade, but also shaping new demographics and power relations. While these developments are often studied with a top-down approach, anthropology can offer a precious contributions to understanding how local dynamics are contributing to broader geopolitical shifts.
Possible fieldsites: China's borderlands with Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar), and South Asia (Pakistan, India, Nepal).
Hunting and human-environment relations in the Alps
There is a long-term tradition of anthropological scholarship on Alpine communities, focusing on key issues such as migration, local identity, and human-environment relations. Today, we need more ethnographic research to address how mountain communities are dealing with some of the key challenges of our times, including rapid demographic and labour shifts, as well as profound changes in climate.
Some key societal development that deserve attention are the growth of the tourism economy, as well as patterns of both in- and out-migration that characterise many Alpine valleys. Likewise relevant are socio-environmental issues such as rising temperatures (and the threat this poses to water security, among other issues), and the related spread of invasive species. Mountain communities from Slovenia to France, northern Italy and southern Germany, are facing many challenges due to various combinations of those factors: land use change and agricultural abandonment, the "return" of large predators, conflicts over natural resources and "green" energy transition, tourism development, the abandonment of mountain villages, the managing of common resources, and so on.