Received Sylff fellowship in 2017.
Academic supervisor: My PhD research is supervised by Prof. Sarah Green and Dr Susanne Dahlgren.
Academic achievements, social engagement initiatives:
I previously hold MA with Distinction in the Middle East & Mediterranean Studies and BA with First-Class Honors in Religion in the Contemporary World from King’s College London. I was granted King’s Alumni Bursary Award 2012 for my excellent academic results and KCL Travel Awards Scheme 2012/13 to support my relevant fieldwork in the Occupied Palestine. I was also granted Helsinki University Travel Grant, Finnish Institute in the Middle East Foundation travel grant, and The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) in 2017 to support my year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Irbid, Jordan.
Current affiliation: University of Helsinki
I am a PhD Candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropologist in the University of Helsinki. Prior to my doctoral studies, I graduated from King's College London, London University, as a Bachelor of Arts (First-class Honours) in Religion in the Contemporary World in 2012 and as a Master of Arts (Distinction) in the Middle East & Mediterranean Studies in 2014. My research interestes include political and economic anthropology, anthropology of values and morality, political ecology, development, poverty alleviation, precarity, refugeedom, human rights, militant ethnography, community organizing, and solidarity. In my ongoing doctoral research, I examine the politics and practices of solidarity, communal organizing, and welfarist activism in a Palestinian refugee camp in Irbid, North of Jordan Based on a year long fieldwork among the volunteers and employees of Al-Farouq charity organization in the camp, I aim to produce a political ethnography of aid that focuses on the socio-political and material consequences of local aid and how aid reworks a given community and society. Given the persistence of poverty and displacement in our increasingly unequal world, the study of how local people manage to organize their communal concerns themselves in adverse circumstances and invent alternatives to current development rationale and practice is relevant. Ethnographic attention to the insight and practices of local charity workers who have engaged in welfarist activism for over two decades in the context of urban poverty, state neglect, and authoritarian surveillance can shed light on how people organize themselves locally in the face of inequalities and perhaps, produce useable knowledge for those seeking social change towards a more just society.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallamariakorhonen
