On Thursday May 11, medical anthropologists from Leiden University organized a festive opening of their new network, the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN). In August 2022, these Leiden-based scholars started gathering and organizing this new network with two main goals, namely to…

Education

Conference

No-one will deny the impact that a good ethnographic documentary can have on our understanding of the subjects (meant in terms of topic, theme and protagonists) of such a documentary, yet how do we define that understanding; what is it that we learn to understand about its subjects? How does this qualify…

Leiden's cultural anthropologist Anouk de Koning is receiving a Vici research grant for her project ‘Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society’ to study welfare experiments in four countries and to examine what they tell us about the futures of European welfare states.

From documentaries, zines and exhibitions to a video installation. Students of the Visual Ethnography master's programme pulled out all the stops to finish their studies in a fantastic way. For one year, the 23 students worked on their own multimedia projects. The screening of the projects took place…

The Leiden University Visual Ethnography collection has been added to Alexander Street Press, an educational streaming video service. The master’s specialization Visual Ethnography has supported many talented individuals to produce inspiring films. About 70 master’s thesis films of the past 8 years…

As part of her Anthropology studies, Leiden student Marleen Kop has made a short documentary about the importance of Leiden-Noord’s ‘soup time’. Her chosen method was participative observation – she spent months helping residents prepare the soup – and the film can now be viewed online.

The starting point of human-induced landscape changes has been under permanent debate. It is widely accepted that the emergence of agriculture strongly increased human impact on their environments. However, foragers can and do actively transform land cover and ecosystems. Ethnographic observations,…

Recently Professor Joanita Vroom’s book Feeding the Byzantine City was published by the prominent academic publishing house Brepols. This volume is the fifth in a series called Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Archaeology, of which she is the editor. ‘This series aims to offer new perspectives…

Alumna Simay Çetin received the award for her Master thesis: ‘Interpreting Culture through Embodied Practice: An anthropological study of sexuality among Dutch Women with Turkish Migrant backgrounds.’ Nova, Marta, Iris and Emma were awarded for their Fieldwork NL report.

To honour the work of its longstanding chair Nick Ryan, CAA International provides the annual Nick Ryan Bursary Award. The Nick Ryan Bursary Award winner is chosen from each year’s student paper presenters. The award goes towards the costs of attending the CAA Conference the following year, up to a…

Carola Hein, Professor of History of Architecture and Urban Planning TU Delft, has been affiliated with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University since January 2022 as Professor Water, Ports, and Historic Cities. On the surface this may seem a strange combination,…

The question of land property titles is a common source of conflict between indigenous communities and federal authorities all over the Americas. A new Panamanian law have led indigenous communities to reach out to archaeologist Dr Natalia Donner. A grant from the Centre for Indigenous American Studies…

Dr Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Assistant Professor at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, and 8 partners have been awarded the project 'BIAS: Mitigating Diversity Biases in the Labour Market', a large €4.7M Horizon Europe grant.

Evi Chatzipanagiotidou is a political anthropologist who researchers conflict and peace, displacement, migration and diasporas, with a particular emphasis on nationalism and anti-nationalism, intra-communal violence, the politics of memory and loss, the social construction of silence(s) and ‘unofficial…

Visual ethnography has become an integral part of anthropology in Leiden. The students from the master’s specialisation will present their work at the LUVE festival on 8, 9 and 10 October. ‘For a film you have to negotiate with your research participants.’

Lecture, Research Seminar

Lecture, Online webinar

How do people talk and not talk about dying when confronted with advanced life-limiting illness? How do Islamic notions of the good death and ethical demands to strive for healing influence medical decision-making in the final phase of life? Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on HIV/AIDS in…

The goal of the school is to help develop their interests and skills in multimodal anthropology, comparative perspectives and collaborative research (including audiovisual methods) by building on the work conducted by the project team over the last four years.

Anthropologist Anouk de Koning about the tottering welfare state and the dilemmas of a government operating as a nearby, friendly partner.

Leiden researchers from different disciplines look together at complex social problems. What happens when they join forces with artists? The results could be seen on Tuesday 11 June during a unique exhibition. Take a look for yourself:

There are approximately 60 million skateboarders worldwide. And yet in the academic world, this culture is not always looked upon seriously. Visual anthropologist Sander Hölsgens believes that this has to change. Last summer his book 'Skateboarding in Seoul' and the accompanying film 'Reverberations'…

Framing Poland through the lens of post-socialism, as is common in the social sciences, has become outdated. This label no longer captures the rapid changes that have taken place since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ola Gracjasz's research shows that people are redefining their national identity, blending…

The Bachelor Honours Class 'Homo Ludens: Why We Play' combines games, theory, and practice. Students dive into all aspects of humanity in which games play a part and discuss them, both on a theoretical an experiential level: 'Occasionally, you touch upon what play is, but then it eludes you.'

Software development is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a sociologist. Three years ago, John Boy began developing his software package Textnets. Because of Corona, he was less able to concentrate on writing scientific research and also setting up the online courses…

Connecting worlds, enhancing research and teaching, and providing innovative solutions to complex social issues: that is the idea behind interdisciplinary research. In that respect, a huge amount happened at Leiden University in 2023.

Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from eLaw collaborates with researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) and University of Delhi (DU) in an effort to explore and reflect upon the potential legal, ethical and pedagogical challenges of deploying a social robot in…

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

Forest degradation has limited the Orang Rimba's access to forest resources. As a result, they've had to make significant cultural modifications and adaptations. Ekoningtyas Margu Wardani explains in her PhD dissertation these transformation processes among Contemporary Indonesian Hunter-Gatherers through…

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO NEXT SEMESTER. School food, feeding, and eating are intertwined with trenchant national and transnational debates on issues of rising obesity, food (in)security, migration, and ‘integration’ in England and other parts of the UK, as also more widely in Europe and beyond.…

Lecture, Research Seminar

Conference, Seminar

Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.

Lecture

Bi-weekly online seminar organised by SAILS

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Lecture, Research Seminar

Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America, chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. Weaving together stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators,…

LUNHA strives to redefine global health by prioritizing justice, fairness, and inclusion in Africa. Through collaboration with diverse stakeholders, LUNHA aims to reshape global health research and foster a broader engagement with social sciences and humanities.

Corinna Jentzsch, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science and co-convener of the Leiden University Center for International Relations (LUCIR) has conducted extensive fieldwork in Mozambique. Her resulting book, Violent Resistance: Militia Formation and Civil…

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants to Leiden researchers.

On 8 March, International Women’s Day, equal opportunities for women worldwide, empowerment, and gender equality take centre stage. For years, the role of women in the past has been nearly invisible. Four archaeologists reflect on this inequality of focus, from hunter-gatherers in the palaeolithic to…

From a queer art exhibition to a podcast about people with disabilities, the JEDI Fund this year again honored several projects that contribute to diversity and inclusion.

The 11th Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture will be delivered by Professor Jason De León as part of the TAKING CARE conference.

Lecture, CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

Lecture

Sylvia Tidey illustrates how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it by combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility. The book 'Ethics or the right thing? Corruption…