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 holds the position of Associate Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research at Kyoto University. 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 been a researcher within the inherit Käte Hamburger Kolleg at Humboldt University, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, 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 plastics, air pollution, Buddhism in the Anthropocene, materiality, doubt, inequality, kinship, cosmological understandings, urban anthropology, nationalism, globalization, temporality, transnational alliances and their historical contingencies.
Research Projects
Saskia’s current project engages the insistent materiality of plastics as they interact with and co-constitute cultural, ecological, and religious spheres. As scholars are increasingly coming to recognise, plastics and their attendant chemical retinues bridge the distance between creation and being, infiltrating and influencing our hormonal systems, bodies, and the experience of being human. In this context the study of heritage takes on a deeply intimate role as the study of the industrial and synthetic materials we have made that now, in turn, make or unmake us.
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 