Nina Gren

Global Gender Studies
PhD

About

I hold a PhD in social anthropology. My PhD thesis from 2009 built on a one-year fieldwork in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. In short, it focused on how the refugees maintain a sense of normality and continuity in everyday life despite constant emergencies. I have taught and supervised at School of Global Studies but is currently on a post-doc in Copenhagen. I have also coordinated the GADIP-network, which aimed to ameliorate exchange between practitioners and academics who work on issues related to development and gender.

Area of interest

My research is primarily about different forms of migration with a special focus on refugees and intervention. I am interested in how political structures, sometimes in the form of political violence, affect people’s everyday lives. As an anthropologist, I am focusing on kinship, gender and people’s relation to place and memory. The geographical areas I work in are Palestine/Israel and the Middle East more generally as well as Scandinavia. In my research on Scandinavia I am also interested in issues of diversity and integration.

Current research

Constructing Houses and Roots: Transnational Belongings among Palestinians in Denmark and Sweden, post-doc funded by the Swedish Research Council, based at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (2011-2012). The project concerns Danes and Swedes with a Palestinian background and their social relations to Palestinians in the Middle East, and how they create a home at different places.

Palestinian Refugee Youth and Humanitarian Intervention through UN Schooling, research project financed by Sida/SAREC, based at School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg (2012-2013). The project will focus on identity formation among young Palestinian refugees in the Middle East in relation to the UN’s educational programmes for Palestinian refugees.

Teaching and tutoring

None at present.

Field experience

• Ongoing fieldwork in Malmö and Copenhagen (2011)
• 1 month of fieldwork in Gaza (2009)
• 1 year of fieldwork in the West Bank (2003-2004)
• Minor Field Study (MFS) in the West Bank (2000)

Selected conferences & presentations

• Gendering Al Nakba –Palestinian Refugee Women’s Stories about Dying Children, at Gender, Displacement, Memory and Agency, Ramallah, West Bank, 5th-7th March 2005
   
• "We are connected to this land" –Palestinian perceptions and practice surrounding restricted mobility, borders and Homeland at Second World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, Amman, 11th-16th June 2006
   
• Constructing 'Normality' in a State of Emergency – A Response to Violence in a Palestinian Refugee Camp during Intifada Al Aqsa, at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 12th December 2006
   
• An Ambiguous Affirmation of Life and a Distant Hope: Palestinian Refugees' Responses to Violence, SANT-konferensen, Uppsala, 23rd-24th March 2007
   
• Practising Morality at Times of Crisis: Palestinian Boundary-Making during the Intifada Al Aqsa. 10th Biennial EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Conference Ljubljana, 26-29 August 2008