Laura Stark
I grew up in an agricultural small town in California, and ’fell in love’ with Finland pretty much ‘first sight’ when I spent as an exchange student in Nastola in the mid-1980s. After receiving my Master’s degree in anthropology in the US, I came to Finland on a Fulbright grant 30 years ago, and I never left. At the moment, I teach lecture courses on ethnological/anthropological theory, on the Islamic religion and on global poverty and development. I also lead the Cultures, Communities and Change research seminar. I am the Editor-in-Chief of the JUF0 3-ranked journal Etnologia Europaea together with Prof. Alexandra Schwellin from Austria’s Klagenfurt University. I also lead, together with Prof. Tiina Kontinen, the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥â€™s international Consortium of African Networks (JYU-CAN), funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education. These networks include FAPI, EDUCASE and SAFINET.
My research is characterized by an enduring interest in gender and the experiences, motives, and goals of persons at the lowest levels of society – whether 19th-century Finnish-speaking peasants and labourers or today’s slum dwellers in Africa. Over the last 10 years my research and teaching has focused on fieldwork in one chronically poor urban neighborhood in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In this neighborhood I have examined survival strategies, gender, power relations, and the challenges of so-called ‘development’. My most recent publications have dealt with early and forced marriage, urban Tanzanian women’s use of mobile phones, the cycle of mobile phone theft and resale in the slum, inequality and informality in African cities, and the challenges of using ethnographic methods in studying the poor in developing countries.
My new research topic is a minority group in Dar es Salaam whose identity cannot be accurately described using the Western term ‘homosexual’, ‘bisexual’ or ‘transgendered’. Drawing on these persons’ experiences and understandings of their own identities, I am inventing new, useful concepts and models for queer anthropology and feminist gender theory. My research in Africa has been highly rewarding precisely because of the people I’ve met there: over the years I have interviewed over 400 people in Tanzania ja I have been touched by their incredible openness, humor, and ’sisu’ in the face of truly difficult conditions.
In addition to research, teaching also brings me a great deal of joy precisely because of the students and PhD students I work with: I have surely learned as much from them as they ever did from me, and their feedback has enabled my courses to improve and develop a great deal over the years. As is the case in KUMU more generally, I share with my students and colleagues a genuine concern over the most pressing problems facing the world today, and a passion for trying to solve these problems through increasing our knowledge.
