Short CV

Marianne Maeckelbergh's research explores alternative practices and theories of democracy, responses to economic crises, global social movements, digital citizenship, and independent media infrastructures. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex, UK in 2008 after obtaining her MA in Social Anthropology of Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In February 2008, she became Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.

Since February 2018 she is Full Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. From 2014-2016 she was visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley on a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is the author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy and recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant on Property and Democratic Citizenship set to begin in the fall of 2018.

Research

In her research, Marianne Maeckelbergh explores everyday practices of democracy and radical politics within social movements and citizen projects. Her early work raises questions about how democratic values change when practiced on a global scale through network structures instead of nation-states through an exploration of prefigurative politics within the alterglobalisation movement.

Since the start of the economic crisis, her work has focussed on the growing distrust of representative democracy and capitalism that is being expressed transnationally. She explores the shared history and practices of multiple struggles across geographic distance (e.g. Egypt, Greece, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the US), as well as how each location's particular history shapes the movements' trajectories. The research has been disseminated through written publications and through the online film series Global Uprisings. The development and use of new digital technologies within these movements have been a key research interest, particularly how the diffuse networked space of digital technology functions in combination with the centralizing spacial configurations of urban space and place.

From 2014-2016 she explored the use of digital technology in the everyday practices of citizen projects in the San Francisco Bay Area as part of a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship. In 2015 she received the NWO Aspasia grant through which she expanded her multi-sited ethnographic research on political engagement and democratic citizenship as Associate Professor at Leiden University.

From fall 2018 onwards, she will lead an ERC-funded research project on eviction and the impact of property regimes (moral discourses, market mechanisms and policy regulations of real landed property) on lived experiences of democratic citizenship across five countries (Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the US).

Grants

• ERC Consolidator Grant (2017) 

• Aspasia Grant of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (May, 2015)

• Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship – University of California at Berkeley (September, 2014)

Relevant links

• Academia.edu: Marianne Maeckelbergh

• Leiden Anthropology Blog: 'Confrontational Self-Organization' (April, 2015)

• Leiden University News: Marie Curie-subsidie voor Marianne Maeckelbergh (29 April, 2014)

• Leiden University News: Marianne Maeckelbergh Uuniversitair Hoofddocent (7 July, 2015)

• Leiden University News: Marianne Maeckelbergh receives ERC Consolidator grant for project ‘Property and Democratic Citizenship’ (6 December, 2017) 

• Women on the verge research network

• Global Uprisings Film Series

Publications