Sophie Elixhauser

‘I am a Senior Project Advisor and a Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. I have a long-standing relation to East Greenland and its people having spent considerable time in the community of Tasiilaq and the surrounding villages (in particular Sermiligaaq) for more than 15 years. The project, I hope, will create a dialogue between local inhabitants and scientists about changes in climate and environment, and an integration of knowledge vice versa. 

I received my Master’s Degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Munich, building on fieldwork conducted in the frame of an interdisciplinary research project on environment and development in the Philippines. For my PhD studies I moved on to the University of Aberdeen, where I embarked on my main and ongoing focus on the Arctic, in particular Greenland. My PhD thesis, published with Routledge in 2018, was on personal autonomy and communication among the people of East Greenland, led by the underlying premise that you cannot clearly separate the human and the non-human environment. Moreover, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Augsburg, in a project about the perceptions of and responses to climate change in the European Alps. Alongside my involvement in this project, I currently work in the field of migration and social services in Southern Germany.’