I am a sociocultural anthropologist and writer exploring how people actively seek transformative reconnections with the environment, land, and community. In doing so I study resurgences of production—from the recreation of craft objects, local food ways, and their ecologies, to large-scale infrastructural revivals, all of which become entangled with wider politics of decolonization and climate change. Projects are ongoing with artisans in Indigenous homelands of Sápmi in Fennoscandia and postcolonial Cyprus, and with communities across the circumpolar North anticipating a Chinese Arctic Silk Road. More broadly, I am interested in the underlying mechanisms of social change—the ways that people seek to transform themselves and society through embodied, material, and digital practice. I received my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and currently work as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maine.
Contact me at natalia.magnani@maine.edu