Charline Kopf

Postdoctoral Fellow - Department of Social Anthropology
Image of Charline Kopf
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Room 942
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Visiting address Moltke Moes vei 31 Eilert Sundts hus 9. etg. 0851 Oslo
Postal address Postboks 1091 Blindern 0317 Oslo

Academic interests and background

Charline is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology. Her work revolves around infrastructure, mobilities and borders in West Africa and questions of history and memory in the postcolonial context. She is enthusiastic about exploring various ethnographic methods, particularly through photography, sound and film.

As part of the Epidemic Traces team, Charline will be working on a new ethnographic and historical project relating to sand, dust and air pollution in Senegal. 

She is currently working on her first book project, Dakar-Bamako: Waiting for a train back to the future, which has been accepted as part of the University of California Press's book series “Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century”. Based on her PhD, 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 for the UN Migration Agency (IOM) in Dakar, 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

Affiliation

Awards

  • Carr and Stahl Fund, St Antony's College, University of Oxford, 2017
  • Godfrey Liehnardt Fieldwork Grant, University of Oxford, 2017

 

Tags: Political Anthropology, Postcolonial studies, Infrastructure, Mali, Senegal, France, urban Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Absurdity, Extractivism

Publications

  • Kopf, Charline (2023). Performing (In)securities in West Africa: Territorial meshing and local participation in cross-border security. Anthropologie & développement. ISSN 2276-2019. p. 125–144. doi: 10.4000/anthropodev.2239.
  • Kopf, Charline (2020). « Le TER nous met à terre. » Senegal on the rails of emergence ? Critique Internationale. ISSN 1290-7839. 4(89), p. 115–139. doi: 10.3917/crii.089.0118.
  • Kopf, Charline (2020). The dynamics of toxic dust. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 36(6), p. 17–20. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12619. Full text in Research Archive
  • Kopf, Charline (2018). Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilisations: Towards a New Imaginary of a Post-ethnographic Museum. Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review.. ISSN 1224-6271. p. 37–55. Full text in Research Archive
  • Kopf, Charline & Bowling, Ben (2017). Transnational policing in Europe and its local effects. European Police Science and Research Bulletin. ISSN 1831-1857. p. 47–57. doi: 10.2825/13491.

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Published Sep. 10, 2018 1:59 PM - Last modified Mar. 8, 2024 11:41 AM

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