Anna Baral

I am postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cultural Sciences, and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. I am working in the project “Let’s Talk About Condoms” (directed by Dr. Åsa Trulsson, Department of Cultural Sciences), exploring young migrants’ experiences of integration through the lenses of sexual health and relationships.

Forskning

My doctoral research, at the intersection of urban anthropology and anthropology of gender and morality, has explored the moral struggles of male informal workers facing sweeping change in Kampala (Uganda). My thesis has been awarded the Westinska Prize of the Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet in Uppsala in 2019.

My previous postdoctoral fellowship within the project IMAGENU (Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda) at Århus University has focused on the intersections of intimacy and mobility in Jinja, a multiethnic Ugandan town. Studying interethnic and interracial couples, I have explored the role of the “elsewhere” in producing sexual and affective hierarchies, in fuelling desires and in challenging belonging. In the past years, also through my experience with RFSL Newcomers, and my work as research assistant for Jesper Bjarnesen’s project on Invisibility in African Displacements, I have developed an interest for how gender and sexuality inform, both inspiring and limiting, migratory experiences.

I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork, mainly in Uganda, over the course of fifteen years, and my publications reflect my participation in projects on cultural heritage, local politics, postcolonial uses of ‘tradition’, and gender and sexuality.

I have lectured in, and been responsible for, BA and MA courses in Anthropology, Gender, African gender and sexualities, Africa Studies and Anthropology of Humanitarian Action (NOHA programme) at Uppsala University and Århus University.