Postdoctoral Affiliate
I am an anthropologist who recently completed a thesis (2024) at the University of Oxford about the situation and identification of stateless Kuwaiti ‘Bidoon’ forced migrants in Europe, particularly Britain and Sweden.
This specifically concerns issues that arise when people try to prove their identities according to the expectations of migration authorities. In a general context of uncertainty, efforts to provide documentation and give oral evidence to caseworkers and tribunal judges leads to several ethical dilemmas, both for forced migrants themselves and their advocates (e.g. activists, lawyers, etc.), but also for those writing about this topic (e.g. researchers). The thesis considers how people deliberate uncertainty and what to do when everything appears risky and potentially harmful. These are questions of relevance to the anthropology of ethics/morality, research ethics, and engaged scholarship. I also explore literary ethnography as a mode of anonymisation and response to fieldwork contingencies.
My doctoral research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Clarendon Fund, St Antony’s College, and the Middle East Centre.
I have additionally been working on a project about mental health among the stateless Kuwaiti/Bidoon community in Britain, with support from the European Network on Statelessness and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. I am currently in the early stages of producing a short documentary film on this topic.
Email: andreas.bjorklund@anthro.ox.ac.uk
