Christine Moderbacher
Job description
Christine Moderbacher is an anthropologist and filmmaker working within the Department of Social Sciences at UiT.
Her work focuses mainly on the use of visual and multimodal techniques to study migratory and marginal experiences.
Academic Interests:
Visual and Multimodal anthropology; confluences of anthropology and art/film; visual and narrative storytelling, qualitative research methods; everyday histories of inclusion and exclusion; refugee and migration studies with an emphasize on im/mobility and the making of home, attachment to soil and belonging, political antagonism in (ethnographic) documentary film, deaf anthropology
Regional: Europe (Belgium, Italy, Alps), Tunisia, Mobile worlds of Cochlea implant uses
Research interests
Having studied Social- (University of Vienna) and Visual Anthropology (University of Manchester), Christine participated in the Master Class SIC - Sound Image Culture Brussels, engaging with artful ways of storytelling and challenging documentary conventions. Working as a filmmaker and conducting narrative participatory projects for years, she has taught workshops on the use of video in anthropology and human rights advocacy in and outside of academia.
She returned to Anthropology as part of the ERC research group “KFI - Knowing from the Inside” at the University of Aberdeen. In her dissertation “Crafting Lives in Brussels: Making and Mobility on the Margins” she explored the lifeworlds of migrants who settled in the district of Molenbeek in Brussels, combining and experimenting with different practices of inquiry (e.g. participant observation, life storytelling and the use of audio-visual tools), reflecting on the at times converging and at times diverging processes of making films and conducting anthropological research.
In 2019 Christine joined the independent research group “Alpine Histories of Global Change: Time, Self and the Other in the German-speaking Alpine region” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology as a postdoctoral researcher. In her project “On what grounds? Attachment and belonging to contested soils in the Alps” she looked at but also beyond reactionary ideas of “soil,” questioning what it means to be attached to and engage with the ground - both as a living compound and as a concrete experience of people's attachment to the soil they live on/with.
Working partly with people whose attachment to soil is linked to nationalistic and anti-globalist sentiments, lead to larger reflection on the challenges of conducting audio-visual research with people anthropologists (and filmmakers) work with but don’t necessarily agree with. With the project “Antagonistic observation. Encounters with right-wing actors in (ethnographic) documentary films” with partners at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) Christine tries to develop new methods and forms of visual anthropology combined with filmic approaches that bring new perspectives to the topic and its ethical challenges. The questions animating this research include how can conducting research with the camera help establishing more nuanced readings of people we work with but we don’t necessarily agree with and where are its limitations? And how can this feed back into (audio-visual) anthropological knowledge and practice in filmmaking and research.
More recently, Christine has started new ethnographic fieldwork the mobility of deaf children wearing cochlea implants and their families.
Previous to her appointment at the UiT, Christine was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, a lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Media Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg and a guest professor at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Germany.
Publications
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0020-1004
Teaching
Christine teaches in the Master of Visual and Multimodal Anthropology program.
Courses include: Contemporary Themes in Social Anthropology, Conveying social realities: Exploring audio-visual narrative strategies and From Fieldwork Experience to Ethnographic Film and Text.