Honorary doctorate 2022: Professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Faculty of Arts)
If we can talk of superstars within international anthropology, Professor Anna Tsing from the University of California is certainly one of them. She is a leading figure within areas such as globalisation, the environment and climate, capitalism, feminism and power, and her research is in an international class of its own. Her work investigates one of the most important questions of our time: how people can change the planet’s environment, atmosphere and ecosystems.
Anna Tsing is a recognised and frequently cited pioneer within multispecies ethnography, who rethinks the role of humanity in the climate and biodiversity crises we are currently facing. She does this by studying the social and asocial relationships that people and other species create with each other at a time when technology is changing the world at an accelerating pace.
Anna Tsing has a strong connection to the anthropology department at Aarhus University, which she has visited on many occasions. From 2013 to 2018, she was a Niels Bohr professor and co-director of the AURA research project (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). In these roles, she helped to create a dynamic, international research environment that attracted several international senior researchers and established AU as a flourishing and internationally leading interdisciplinary research community for research on the Anthropocene era.