Karin Ahlberg
Karin Ahlberg is a social anthropologist and a CRDF postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research with focus on maritime and more-than-human anthropology.
Karin’s research explores the origins and effects of an unprecedented marine-species transformation in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the route between Europe and India, accelerated human and goods mobility and facilitated the colonization of eastern Africa and the East. But every human infrastructural project is also a multispecies affair. As a result of successive dredging of the canal to allow for larger vessels, the Suez Canal today constitutes a free-flowing water passageway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea/Indian Ocean. So far, more than 600 tropical marine species have moved through the canal and settled in the Mediterranean Sea. The new species are changing seascapes and sea cultures in various ways: invasive species take over seascapes and threat endemic species, fishermen find new sources of income in an overfished sea, sea traffic is regulated to avoid the spread of alien species and new culinary dishes are emerging. Karin explores this unruly environmental afterlife of the Suez Canal on land and under the surface through ethnographic research with humans and fishes in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin.
Karin received her PhD from SOAS, University of London in 2017. Her PhD dissertation explores statecraft, image making and the politics of Egyptian tourism before and after 2011. She conducted twenty months of fieldwork in Cairo in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution and is currently working on a book manuscript based on this research. Before joining the department, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago and a Teacher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and Stockholm University.
Karin is also the PI of two research projects The Environmental Afterlife of the Suez Canal and BIOrdinary: biodiversity dilemmas in ordinary places with home at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.
Academic texts
[forthcoming] Ahlberg, Karin & Bengt G. Karlsson. Plant mobility in (ed) Noel B. Salazar. Anthropological Handbook of Mobility. Berghahn.
[forthcoming] Bubandt, N., Chao, S., Lien, M., Paxson, H., Virtanen, P., Cole, T., & Ahlberg, K. (2025). Anthropologists Are Talking about Ecography. Ethnos.
2025 Ahlberg, K. and P. Kompatsiaris. Introduction: The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemies. Society and Animals 2 (2025): 115-130.
2025 von Essen, Erica, Emily Wanderer, Gabriel Lennon, and Karin Ahlberg. "The wild workforce: Enlisting non-human labor in invasive species management." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space: s25148486241300941.
2024 von Essen, E., Ahlberg, K., Cole, T., Karlsson, B. G., & Ma?ek, I.. Dealing with Biodiversity Dilemmas in Ordinary Places: The Case of Invasive and Introduced Species. Nature and Culture, 19(3), 237-245.
2024 Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt: On the importance of ambiguity in an authoritarian state. Allegra Lab, June 2024.
2023 Egypt With or Without Islam: The Work Behind Glossy Tourism Advertisements in Branding the Middle East (ed) Steffen Wippel.
2022 Who Cares about Jellyfish? An Environmental Legacy of the Suez Canal Begins to Surface. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 54(4), 764-771.
Organization
Workshops & Conferences
2025 The sea ends here. Past apocalypses, future grabs and itineraries in-between. Workshop. ANTHSEAS, MedNet Anthropology and DEEPMED. Algeciras, Spain. Nov 3-5.
In ancient Greece, the Strait of Gibraltar marked the end of the civilized world and human exploration evinced by its name Non plus ultra (nothing further beyond). With the strait as vantage point, the workshop The sea ends here explores ends and endings connected to movements in and across the Mediterranean and oceans. Competing endings and futures are ever so present in areas along Mediterranean shores as well as below the sea surface. Parallel to economic crises, hijacked uprisings, the refugee crisis and environmental degradation governments stage bright futures through green-energy and corporate megaprojects. Similarly, blue-economy optimism on oceans intersects scenarios of extinction and ecological collapse. On the ground, as beneath the waves, people navigate new endings, readjusting life-trajectories and dreams. Others already live “past the apocalypse” embarking on dangerous crossings of the sea in search for new beginnings.. Where does a sea, a maritime route, a refugee's journey, a political uprising, or toxic waste end? Can we draw lines in the water? What constitutes an end: a dream or a destination, a physical or man-made barrier, a closure or a new beginning? How do people set, enforce, and cross political and disciplinary boundaries in three-dimensional spaces? Where, when and how futures begin and end? And who grabs futures?
2024 Ecologies, infrastructures and futures in the absence of sovereignty. Workshop. FIME/CEDEJ, CEDEJ. Cairo, Egypt. Dec 8-9.
In this workshop, we bring together early-career scholars working on ecologies and infrastructures in place the Middle East and along the Suez Canal-shipping route that are experiencing accelerated environmental degradation and overheating. The purpose is to compare and contrast how ecological, energy and infrastructural projects and circulations play out in these sites with different scales and impacts of non-sovereignty, and explore how everyday people, other living beings and ecologies adjust to these conditions, as climate change and ecological damage add new challenges to already marginalized positions. We ask what forms of reclaiming, refusal or resistance by human or more-than-human collectives (Khayyat 2022) become visible? We are interested in how our interlocutors engage in future-making and imagine the good life even as they argue that there “is no future” for them or their craft. How are terrestrial energy systems, agricultural practices, technocratic forms of knowledge, or more-than-human relationalities being reconfigured? Who are grabbing futures in these scenarios? And how unruly ecologies and non-human beings’ life-trajectories in a warming world challenge capital, sovereignty and local people’s world-making?
2024 Ocean Worlds: From the outside it. Workshop. University of Bremen. Bremen and Bremerhaven, Germany. Sept 26-28.
The goal of this workshop is thus to share our knowledge and networks as we think through oceanic materialities, ecologies, world histories, societies, economies and infrastructural projects. How does thinking from the seas and the oceans push us conceptually, theoretically, empirically, methodologically? What does thinking from the water ?s edge, from aboard vessels, and from the materiality, movement, and depth of the ocean itself mean for us as we think about current and future research trends? The point about moving from terracentric concepts to the seas and oceans is that it ought to be transformative – more than just a shift of routinized, time-honoured concepts and methods to new sites and locations. Instead, the oceanic turn promises to be a theory machine, as Stefan Helmreich put it – an object in the world that stimulates novel theoretical as well as methodological and empirical formulations. https://crowdusg.net/2024/09/26/ocean-worlds-from-the-outside-it/
2024 Blue BIOrdinaries: Multi-disciplinary methods and vernacular understandings of marine biodiversity shifts. BIOrdinary Summer School 2024. Bohusl?n, Sweden. June 16-19.
Life in most places unfolds in relation to constantly changing circumstances and multitudes of other living beings that constitute multi-species entanglements. Thus, the focus of the BIOrdinary Summer School this year is vernacular marine entanglements. Vernacular marine entanglements encourage us to think beyond the binary of endemic, native species with a right to belong and “invasive” species out of place that has been a dominant starting point for ecological research and policy agendas on biodiversity. Attentiveness to vernacular understandings gives us an opportunity to explore different perceptions of the environment from biologists, locals, multispecies brokers, and perhaps also the sea creatures themselves. By engaging with a range of different ways of knowing and being (entangled), we explore the predicaments along with challenges when it comes to defining and practicing biodiversity. Considering more basic ontological differences in these perceptions as well as possibilities for what we call “troubled coexistence,” the school also asks critical questions about what a more inclusive multispecies biodiversity agenda might entail. www.su.se/socialantropologiska-institutionen/kalender/biordinary-summer-school-1.738168
2024 Ocean, Seas, Canals, and Rivers: Connecting the Blue Humanities in Stockholm. Workshop. Stockholm University. May 20-22.
A three-day workshop including scholars from the "SEATIMES” project at Bergen University and "Off the Menu" project at Augsburg University with focus on sharing experience on how to do research on, in and with water and aquatic species. https://www.biordinary.se/post/ocean-seas-canals-and-rivers-connecting-the-blue-humanities-in-stockholm
2023 Fluid Scales & Sea Times. Peoples, marine creatures and concepts beyond terracentric visions. BIOrdinary Ocean Day. Conference. Stockholm University. Dec 13.
By engaging with fluid scales, sea times, and fishy mobilities, the BIOrdinary Ocean Day seeks to unmoor anthropology and explore how stuff – inhabitants, concepts and methods – appear from the perspective of the sea and river. The day consist of seven presentations or provocations followed by longer, open discussions about topics and themes raised by the presenters. https://www.su.se/socialantropologiska-institutionen/kalender/biordinary-ocean-day-1.694274
2023 Crossing the divide: Exploring Mediterranean places across Mediterranean, European and Middle Eastern Anthropology. 10th MedNet Workshop in cooperation with The Institute of Mediterranean, European and Comparative Ethnology (IDEMEC). Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence. Oct 26-28.
Mediterranean Anthropology, European Anthropology and Middle Eastern Anthropology study overlapping areas of the Mediterranean region. Reflecting geopolitical divisions of the area, the three regional traditions have over the years developed their own theoretical concerns, ethnographic concerns,and political-ethical agendas. The 2023 MedNet workshop seeks to cross the traditional disciplinary division between the Southern, Eastern and Northern shores in order to foster productive intellectual crossings and ethnographic cross-pollination. We ask: how can we advance anthropology in and of the Mediterranean by bringing different regional traditions into closer conversation? https://calenda.org/1067270
2023 Landscapes as archives: Multi-disciplinary methods for documenting socio-biological histories in ordinary places. BIOrdinary Summer School 2023. Norberg, Sweden. June 19-21.
Situated in Bergslagen, Norberg has a rich history of mineral extraction stretching back more than a thousand years. Mining, with its concomitant activities and afterlives, has significantly impacted landscapes and biodiversity compositions in the area. The summer school sought to advance our understanding of shifting biodiversity in so-called ‘ordinary places’ by learning how to notice and trace the entangled social, cultural, and biogeographical processes that have shaped and continue to mould these landscapes today. Over the course of three days, the school brought together scholars, county civil servants, artists, and members of the public to explore these socio-ecological histories and changes in biodiversity through a mix of indoor activities (scholarly presentations, arts events and discussions) and three excursions. Guided by experts, the excursion participants learned different methods how to approach ordinary places that have experienced clear-cutting, forest fires, and the lingering afterlives of mining and species extinction as archives, appreciating the landscape as resulting from a range of intertwined anthropogenic, ecological and geological factors and processes. www.biordinary.se/_files/ugd/38755a_d8bb77e63627496187fc0cfb53a490f0.pdf
Conference Panels and Roundtables
2024 Claiming the sea, seaing anthropology: more-than-human mobilities, fluid laws and ocean grabs, with J. Iozzelli and E. Cyr. European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Conference. Barcelona, Spain. July 23-26.
This oceanic panel asks what a view from the sea with a focus on the major movements unfolding in our oceans - human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations - teaches us about sedentary, capitalist and colonial legacies and logics in anthropology and beyond.
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2024/programme#14703
2023 Caring Environments: Biodiversity in ordinary places. Roundtable. Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT) Conference. Stockholm, Sweden. April 27-29.
Troubled by the limited vision of biodiversity, this roundtable aims to discuss: Biodiversity for whom and for what purpose? On what basis are migrating species framed as invasive instead of climate refugees? What type of biodiversity does the current agenda care for? Building on growing insights into more-than-human relations and challenging the idea that only human actors engage in care, we use ‘caring environment' as an analytic to critique the limited vision of the biodiversity. We encourage contributions that take interest in matters of care and biodiversity outside of ‘hotspots.’ Just as welcome are speakers who critically engage the ethics and politics implied in the current biodiversity paradigm from the perspective of care. Lastly, we invite participants who focus on environments and ecologies as caring systems set up in ways that complicate the assumptions of the current biodiversity agenda. https://www.su.se/socialantropologiska-institutionen/forskning/konferenser-och-seminarier/rt2-caring-environments-biodiversity-in-ordinary-places-1.651946
Presentations
Invited talks
2023 “In the wake of the Suez Canal: Alien species, marine heatwaves and biodiversity shifts in the Mediterranean Sea.” Helsinki Social and Cultural Anthropology Seminars, University of Helsinki. Dec 15.
https://www.helsinki.fi/assets/drupal/2023-09/Anthropology_Seminars_2023-24.pdf
Conferences & workshops
2025 “The Fish that is Taking over the World.” Sea Monsters for the Landlocked. Research Institute for Sustainability, Potsdam. Workshop. July 4.
2024 “Multispecies invasiorism: cultivating an appetite for aliens in the Mediterranean Sea,” with E. Cyr. 4th World Congress of Environmental History. University of Oulu. Aug 19-23.
To cultivate a taste for aliens is challenging for humans and fishes. To disentangle the meanings and politics assigned to more-than-human eating, this talk thinks through multispecies invasivorism (eating invasive species) as a solution for controlling alien marine species in the waters of Crete.
https://wceh2024.com/programme#13375.75516
2024 “Introduction: Claiming the sea, seaing anthropology: more-than-human mobilities, fluid laws and ocean grabs.” The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Conference. Barcelona, Spain. July 23-26.
This first presentation introduces the themes and conceptualisation of the panel: Why we want to think human and non-human mobility, sea grabs, and their concomitant regulations together; Why we chose claiming and movements as a key terms; What a view from the sea offers anthropological thinking.
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2024/programme#14703
2024 “Cruel environmentalism and invasivore optimism: on aliens and bellies, hope and despair in the Mediterranean Sea.” EASST-4S Conference. Amsterdam, Netherlands. July 16-19.
This talk delves into feelings of hope and despair when it comes to alien marine species and shifting marine ecologies in the Mediterranean Sea. Through ‘cruel environmentalism,’ I describe my interlocutors’ apocalyptic mindset and analyze why eating alien fish can be seen as hopeful acts.
https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst-4s2024/paper/85719
2023 “In the wake of the Suez Canal: Cultural memories and shifting relations to a sea undergoing irreversible change”. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 57th Annual Meeting. Nov 2-5.
In 2008, Egyptian newspapers reported eight members of a family dead after consuming a meal of seafood (Ali 2008) in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, located on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and famous for seafood. The tragedy was bewildering because a sea creature of such poisonous potency was unheard of. The culprit was a bulky silver-dotted pufferfish (Lagocephalus sceleratus), one of the 600 alien species that have drifted north through the Suez Canal and settled in the Mediterranean. In this roundtable, I will talk about cultural memories and current affects among people living with a sea that is changing beyond recognition. Based on research in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, I discuss people’s shifting relation to the Sea undergoing one of the world’s largest species transformations.