Academic interests and background
Charline is a researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology whose work examines infrastructures, labour and the material and temporal politics of everyday life in West Africa and North Africa. She is currently working on two projects.
As part of the Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene (AMBER) team, which she has just joined, her project examines the social life of fossils and amber as they move between excavation and trade sites, workshops and museums in Morocco, asking how the materiality of these substances shapes the economies, social relations and heritage narratives that form around them.
In Epidemic Traces, her project Atmospheres of Dust: Particles, Pollution and Protests in Senegal focuses on air pollution and Saharan dust in West Africa, tracing how meteorological processes and airborne particles shape the atmospheres of industrial and environmental transformation and the forms of protest that arise around them. The project is supported by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) and a Wenner-Gren postdoctoral fellowship, with fieldwork based in Mauritania and Senegal where she is affiliated with the IRL "Environnement, Santé, Sociétés" (IRL3189), a CNRS international laboratory at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar.
Her first book Afterplace: The Work of Waiting Along the Dakar–Bamako Railway was selected as part of the University of California Press series Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century and published in 2026. It takes the almost abandoned Dakar-Bamako railway as a starting point to explore the socio-political and material (after-)life of this piece of infrastructure that spans across Senegal and Mali. She traces how the railway workers interact with this almost, but not quite, abandoned network, and how they keep up their hopes, aspirations, and find ways of enduring and resisting the uncertainties of the current moment. By taking the reader on a journey along the train tracks, her ethnography of maintenance, expectation and remembrance contributes to studies of postcolonial capitalist relations as developed in and through material infrastructure.
Prior to joining the anthropology departments at UiO and KU Leuven as a member of the multidisciplinary PhD programme Anthusia (Anthropology of Human Security in Africa), she received her MPhil at the University of Oxford, and her BA at King's College London. She has also worked as a research fellow at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London and the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.
Courses taught
- SOSANT9015 Writing and method
- SOSANT2570 Anthropology of Infrastructure
- SOSANT2120 Regional Ethnography: Africa
- SOSANT2550 Medical anthropology
- ANTH4010 Advanced Anthropological Theory
- Deep Reading
Affiliation
- Researcher in Amber Worlds (2026 - 2028)
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Epidemic Traces (2022 - 2026)
- Early Stage Researcher in ANTHUSIA (UiO and KU Leuven, 2018 - 2022)
- Forms of Ethnography – Ethnography as Form
- Medical and Environmental Anthropology for East Africa in the 21st-century - AnthEM
Awards
- Carr and Stahl Fund, St Antony's College, University of Oxford, 2017
- Godfrey Liehnardt Fieldwork Grant, University of Oxford, 2017
- Environment and Energy Grant, University of Oslo, 2025
- Aslaug Johanne og Johannes Falkenbergs stiftelse, 2025
- Wenner Gren, Post-PhD Research Grant, 2025