Christina Jerne

Christina Jerne

Assistant Professor

My research focuses on economic diversity. Among other things, this means that I am concerned with learning from different forms of labour, property, trade, marketing and debt that  a) are either not recognized as "productive" parts of the formal economy (such as criminal, informal and illicit economies), or b) are in someway challenging business-as-usual models of economy which are seen as harmful to people and other living beings.

 

Primary fields of research

I have worked with political, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of various types of enterprise such as:

Mafia, anti-mafia, gangs, legal and illegal alcohol production, experience economies (tourism, difficult heritage, hospitality), agriculture and food, post-conflict livelihoods.

Themes: power, labour and work, property, debt, redistribution, marketing, desire and its negation, reciprocity, mimicry and opposition, agency and affordance, ethnic minorities and conflict, limits, dependency.

Approaches and methods: Affect, phenomenology, immaterialism, realism, feminist political economy, action research.  

Regional specialisation: I have carried out fieldwork in Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Uganda.

 

Current research

My current work revolves around the phenomenon of slow-living and de-urbanization in Italy. Many people around the world are exhausted and are quitting their jobs and fast-paced city lives. What happens to their livelihoods and to the rural settings they return to? This is part of a larger project called "RE-ANIMATE
Designs for Life-Enhancing Economies in Anthropological Perspective".

 

I am also affiliated to the  'Centre for Global Criminology'. At the centre, we aim to develop a novel and ethnographically oriented approach to the study of criminal developments in our contemporary world where crime increasingly travels across national borders.

Teaching

My teaching and supervision seek to inspire diverse ways of conceptualising and doing economy and politics across scales and sectors. I also work as a consultant in critical experiential design for different contexts (E.g. museums, political campaigns, tourism sites and itineraries, libraries, commercial events, video games, difficult heritage sites, public urban space).

ID: 208910883