It is my secret mission and major pleasure to bring more anthropology into social media.
Yaroslava Bukhta
You may recognise third year anthropology doctoral student Yaroslava Bukhta from Oxford University socials. She has been recruited to help create video content to be used on the University's socials including Instagram, TickTock and LinkedIn. She highlights all sorts of research, for instance, a recent video about what would happen if food companies reduced the salt in their food by 17%, which was viewed by around 90,000 users on Instagram.
But she's also working hard to get more anthropology into the conversation. Recently she pitched and created her own International Women's Day video on Mākereti Papakura, believed to be the first indigenous woman to study at the University of Oxford. Last year, Mākereti was awarded a posthumous MPhil in Anthropology. Through her videos, Yaroslava saw the opportunity to highlight Mākereti's work as an anthropologist; how Mākereti documented the experiences of Māori women drawing on her lived knowledge, all in contrast to the dominant outsider, male voices in anthropology of the 1930s.
Yaroslava is currently writing up her doctoral thesis on media, audiences and conflict reporting, similarly drawing on her experience as a journalist and contacts within the country of her birth, Ukraine. She came to anthropology through the questions she found herself asking in her professional life. Listening to people, asking why, and a little help from Google led her to an MPhil in Social Anthropology looking at how journalists choose which stories to report. That in turn led to her DPhil. She uses her own Instagram to inspire others, particularly young women, who 'don't believe they can make it' and of course to get people thinking about the 'whys'.
She was one of one of Oxford’s first Ukrainian scholars and is co-president of the Women’s Leadership Programme committee at St John's College.
