Dr Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko is an anthropologist and the author of Enlightenment and the Gasping City. She has published on the topics of plastics, global warming and pollution, doubt and materiality, Buddhism, shamanism, postsocialism, and economic anthropology in Australia, Mongolia, and India. She is currently a Marie S. Curie FCFP Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr Abrahms-Kavunenko is dedicated to the role of anthropologist as co-communicator and collaborative agent. Her work is situated at intersections between environmental changes and cultural praxis, in multi-scalar and trans-species contexts. She has held research positions at the University of Copenhagen, IMéRA Aix-Marseille Université, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, New York University Shanghai, the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the co-founder of Cenote (seh-notay) a travelling multi-disciplinary residency program committed to bridging the communicative gap that yawns ever wider between human cultures and the living systems and intelligences which support and co-constitute our existence.
Saskia’s work has included studies of air pollution, Buddhism in the Anthropocene, plastics, materiality, doubt, inequality, kinship, cosmological understandings, urban anthropology, nationalism, globalization, temporality, transnational alliances and their historical contingencies.
Research Projects
Saskia’s current project looks at how Buddhists see themselves in relation to the technologies and economies that plastics have co-produced. By looking at how Buddhists reject, venerate, and are flooded with plastic items, Always Already Entwined/Impure investigates how Buddhists view their separation and/or integration in a world awash with plastics. She is based at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
Residencies
Saskia has been involved in a number of academic/artist residency programs. She is the co-founder of Cenote (seh-notay) an interdisciplinary roving residency program.
Contact
s.abrahms.k[@]gmail.com
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko 