Femke Vulto

femke vulto

DPhil Student

Keble College

Research: My DPhil project focusses on the global supply chain of the brown shrimp as it traverses various sites of production, circulation and consumption. In 2021, Brown shrimp are caught in the shallow waters of the North Sea by Dutch, German and Danish fishermen. Processing companies buy shrimp from these fishermen and truck them to factories in Morocco where female workers manually peel shrimp. Shrimp are subsequently trucked back to the Netherlands and distributed amongst European supermarkets, wholesalers and restaurants. This project seeks to investigate how concepts such as ‘sustainability’, ‘value’ and ‘labour’ are actively produced within this highly distributed yet delicately situated supply chain. Primarily, I am interested in how various actors understand, reproduce and negotiate the supply chain of brown shrimp through their everyday actions. As such, I am interested how ‘the everyday’ and ordinary ethics lie at the heart of contemporary forms of global capitalism.

Research Interests

Anthropology of Supply Chains; Anthropology of Labour and Value; Ordinary Ethics; Multi-Sited Ethnography; the Everyday; Anthropology of Morocco

Previous Education
​BA in Philosophy, University of Groningen (2019); MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (2021)

Supervisor