Professor Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
- Professor of Applied Anthropology
- Bournemouth Gateway Building BG501, St Pauls Lane, Bournemouth, BH8 8GP
Biography
I am a social anthropologist with a background in applied anthropology. I like to engage students in authentic assignments such as producing ‘expert reports’, ‘policy briefs’ or ‘anti-discrimination campaigns’ in cross-cultural comparison. These are modelled on my experience as practising anthropological consultant, responding to real world challenges.
Since BU’ supported a co-creative, interdisciplinary project (Fusion Fund) in 2015, which allowed me to take 16 cross-faculty students and colleagues from Bournemouth to Kosovo, where we collaborated with our colleagues at University of Prishtina and civil society partners, I have increasingly involve participatory arts-based methodologies in my research, teaching and practice activities. All my research projects since (including AHRC-GCRF; UK government; and development industry funding) explore how young people, both at home and abroad, can be encourage and empowered to make sense of, and critically explore, sensitive pasts and difficult presents (including during lock-down at home); as well as to envisage better futures, with help of creative and innovative methods and technologies... We have aimed to invert the gaze of learning from West-East to more mutual, including East-West, knowledge transfers, partly facilitated through five years of generous Erasmus funding facilitating student/staff mobility between Bournemouth and Prishtina. Recognising normalised structures of inequality and changing these has also been at the basis of any arts-based educational, research and practice projects aimed at improving cross-generational communication in address contemporary challenges, both at home and abroad.
Originally I conducted ethnography in post-socialist Albania, a country which, during the 1990, faced prolonged periods of state failure and unrest. I studied translocal evocations of local pasts and related identity negotiations in response. From 2000 I extended my research to the politics of memory, identity and state-building in post-conflict Kosovo. Meanwhile, I held academic positions at UCL (1997-2003), Bologna University (2003 – 2013) and University of Roehampton (2011 – 2013). From 2002, I also practiced as an independent academic consultant advising international agencies such as OSCE, World Bank, NATO, IOM, the ICTY; and UK agencies such as police, social services, the Crown Court and immigration tribunals (including in an array of country guidance cases). Numerous stories of persecution relating to blood feuds, sexual or ethnic identities, desertion, war rape, human trafficking and domestic violence, sparked my interests in ethics; transnationalism; epistemic justice and interventionalism; and the politics of representations and their effect on both policies and social realities. The collegial networks, friendships and collaborations, as well as intellectual stimulations arising from my original area of specialisation in the Western Balkans continue to inspire my work today, although my focus has now widened across the globe.
moreFavourites
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., Amelidis, P. and Sheppard, N., 2023. Creating Soundscapes: Report on piloting the ‘FAM-Strategy’ in a Participatory Action Research Workshop Fostering Creative Thinking and Non-Verbal Storytelling with Young People at Risk of Criminal Exploitation in Shkodër, Albania, Sept 2022. Bournemouth - Tirana: Centre for Seldom Heard Voices. Available from: https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-seldom-heard-voices/centre-working-papers-resources.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., Berry, M., Sheppard, N. and Thartori, K., 2023. Local Perspectives on Young Albanian Serious Organised Crime (SOC) Risks (Results of Focus Group Discussions). Bournemouth - Tirana: Centre for Seldom Heard Voices. Available from: https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-seldom-heard-voices/centre-working-papers-resources.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2023. Piloting the FAM-Strategy: how do the arts inspire personal and social change? In: RAYS Conference, Tirana (Albania).
- Klinkner, M. and Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2022. Transitional justice principles versus survivors’ experience – conflicting interpretations in Kosovo case study involving missing persons and their memorialisation. In: Rauschenbach, M., Viebach, J. and Parmentier, S., eds. Localising Memory: The Dynamics and Informal Practices of Memorialisation after Mass Violence and Dictatorship. Routledge.
- Luci, N. and Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2020. Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism: An auto-ethnography of transnational student encounters in a post-war memory and reconciliation project in Kosovo. Nations and Nationalism, 26 (2), 477-493.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., Gusia, L., Luci, N. and Pollozhani, L., 2019. Fragments on Heroes, Artists and Interventions: Challenging Gender Ideology and Provoking Active Citizenship through the Arts in Kosovo. In: Cooke, P. and Soria-Dolan, I., eds. Post-Participatory’ Arts for the ‘Post-Development’ Era. London: Routledge.
- Collantes-Celador, G. and Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2019. Police Reform and Human Rights in the Western Balkans: introduction to special section. International Journal of Human Rights.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S. and Klinkner, M., 2019. Longing for lost normalcy: Social memory, transitional justice, and the ‘house museum’ to missing persons in Kosovo. Nationalities Papers, 47 (2), 232-247.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., Armakolas, I., Demjaha, A., Elbasani, A., Skendaj, E. and Tzifakis, N., 2017. Introduction. State-building in Post-Independence Kosovo: Policy Challenges and Societal Considerations. Prishtina: Kosovo Foundation for Open Society, 29-48.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2013. The Bequest of Ilegalja: Contested Memories and Moralities in Contemporary Kosovo. Nationalities Papers, 41 (6), 953-970.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2013. Democratisation through Defiance? The Albanian Civil Organisation 'Self-Determination' and International Supervision in Kosovo. In: Bojicic-Dzelilovic, V., Ker-Lindsay, J. and Kostovicova, D., eds. Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S. and Ströhle, I., 2012. An Ethnography of 'Political Will': Towards a Thick Description of Internal Scripts in Post-War Kosovo’. Südosteuropa, 60 (4), 497-513.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2010. Between Social Opprobrium and Repeat Trafficking: choices and chances of Albanian women deported from the UK. In: Holmes, L., ed. Trafficking and Human Rights: European and Asia-Pacific Perspectives. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 95-115.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2010. Invisible - Inaudible: Albanian Memory of Socialism after the War in Kosovo. In: Todorova, M. and Gille, Z., eds. Post-Communist Nostalgia. Oxford - New York: Berghahn Books, 96-112.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2009. Securing Safe Spaces: Field Diplomacy in Albania and Kosovo. In: Huggins, M.K. and Glebbeek, M.-L., eds. Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research. Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 173-198.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2008. Albanians, Albanianism and the Strategic Subversion of Stereotypes (republication). Anthropological Notebooks, 14 (2), 47-64.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S. and Ströhle, I., 2007. Der Nachhall des Sozialismus in der albanischen Erinnerung des Nachkriegskosovos [repercussions of Socialism in Albania memory of post-war Kosovo] (German). In: Brunnbauer, U. and Troebst, S., eds. Zwischen Amnesie und Nostalgie: Die Erinnerung an den Kommunismus in Südosteuropa [Between Amnesia and Nostalgia: Memory of Communism in Southeastern Europe]. Köln Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 216-235.
- Di Lellio, A. and Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2006. The legendary commander: The construction of an Albanian master-narrative in post-war Kosovo. Nations and Nationalism, 12 (3), 513-529.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S. and Di Lellio, A., 2006. Sacred Journey to a Nation: the Construction of a Shrine in Postwar Kosovo. Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 7 (1), 27-49.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2005. ‘Culture' in Court: Albanian Migrants and the Anthropologist as Expert Witness. In: Pink, S., ed. Applications of Anthropology: Professional Anthropology in the Twenty-first Century. Oxford - New York: Berghahn Books, 209-228.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2004. Albanians, Albanianism and the Strategic Subversion of Stereotypes. In: Hammond, A., ed. The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945 – 2003. Aldershot: Ashgate Pub Limited, 110-126.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 2004. Times Past: References for the Construction of Local Order in Present-Day Albania. In: Todorova, M.N., ed. Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 103-128.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 1999. Humiliation and Reconciliation in Northern Albania: The Logics of Feuding in Symbolic and Diachronic Perspectives. Sociologus, Supplement 1, 133-152.
- Schwandner-Sievers, S., 1999. The Albanian Aromanians' Awakening: Identity Politics and Conflict in Post-communist Albania. Flensburg, Germany: European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI).