Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka

Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka

Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (born July 20, 1956 in Warsaw , Poland ) teaches as a professor of social anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University . She has Swiss citizenship.

biography

From 1975 to 1989 Pfaff-Czarnecka studied ethnology, law, journalism and folklore at the University of Zurich . There she also obtained her doctorate and qualified as a professor in 2001 ( license to teach ethnology). She conducted extensive field research in the Himalayan region (especially in Nepal) and in the Central European immigration societies. Her research topics include: the Hindu caste system, local perspectives on processes of democratization, ethnic relationships and the theory of belonging. She is currently researching 'the social life' of the university, including v. a. the inequalities and heterogeneities in the process of studying.

After several years of teaching in Zurich, she worked as a translator in Nepal in 1998 as part of the first mission of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and then from 1999 to 2001 as a research assistant and deputy director at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn . She has also taught at the universities of Bern, Oxford, Tokyo and Kathmandu and has held numerous international fellowships. Since 2001, Pfaff-Czarnecka has been a professor at the chair for social anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. In 2004 she turned down an offer at the University of Vienna . She was extensively involved in scientific committees, including as President of the Swiss Ethnological Society, as Vice Rector of Bielefeld University, as Dean of the Faculty of Sociology, as Co-Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University and as Senator of the German Research Foundation (DFG) .

In addition to German and Polish, the Swiss also speaks English, Nepali and French.

Main publications

• Nepal and the Wealth of Knowledge. Inequality, Aspiration, Competition and Belonging . The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture. Kathmandu, Nepal: Social Science Baha, 2019.
• Affiliation in the Mobile World: Politics of Location . The Political as Communication, Volume 3. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012.
• Ethnic futures. State and Identity in Four Asian Countries , co-authored with D. Rajasingham, A. Nandy and T. Gomez. New Delhi: Sage, 1999.
• Power and ritual purity. Hindu caste system and ethnic relations in the development process of Nepal . Grüsch: Rüegger, 1989.

Editorships

• University social life . Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017.
• Spaces of Violence in South Asian Democracies: Citizenship, Nationalist Exclusion and the (il) legitimate Use of Force, together with E. Gerharz. Asian Journal of Social Science (Brill) 2017, 45 (6): 613-638.
• Facing Globalization in the Himalayas. Belonging and the Politics of the Self , with G. Toffin. New Delhi: Sage, 2013.  
• The Politics of Belonging in the Himalayas: Local Attachments and Boundary Dynamics , with G. Toffin. New Delhi: Sage, 2011.  
• Nationalism and Ethnicity in Nepal , together with D. Gellner and J. Whelpton. Kathmandu: Vajra Publishers, 2008.  
• The ethnicization of the political. Identity Politics in Latin America, Asia and the USA , together with C. Büschges. Frankfurt / New York: Campus, 2007.
• Rituals today: theories, controversies, drafts , together with C. Caduff. Berlin: Reimer, 1999.  

Web links

• Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka on the website of Bielefeld University
• Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka in the AcademiaNet database of renowned scientists