Assistant Professor Karen Waltorp
Karen Waltorp is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is currently Assistant Professor at Aarhus University, carrying out a collaborative film and research project ARTlife: Articulations of Life among Afghans in Denmark (AUFF 2017-2020).
Her foci are visual anthropology, digital ethnography and collaborative methodologies, studying (with) people with particular attention to how digital media and emerging technologies afford new configurations of personhood of space, adding new dimensions to local environments. Waltorp works on long-term research projects grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and experimental methodologies, and has carried out recurrent fieldwork in South Africa since 2005 and in Denmark since 2010, with shorter fieldwork trips to Mauritania, France and Iran.
She is the co-convener of the European Association for Social Anthropologists’ Future Anthropologies Network since 2016, working towards an engaged, interventionist, and public anthropology. She has published in numerous international journals, including Ethnos, Journal of Visual Anthropology, International Communication Gazette, Journal of media and communications research on digital-visual anthropology, social media and ‘the flow of images’; on migration, gender, kinship, racialization, and Islam in Europe; as well as on methodology, epistemology, and politics of representation.
Her monograph Why Muslim Women and Smartphones: Mirror Images fuses the above-mentioned fields, and is published 20.02.2020 by Bloomsbury, with an Australian book launch on March 18th.
Waltorp is Visiting scholar in February-March with Sarah Pink at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, working on a co-edited book An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies (under contract with Bloomsbury), an upcoming EASA panel, and other network-related activities in the Future Anthropologies Network.