Dr. Sophie Strauß

Sophie Strauß is a social anthropologist with the regional focus on Indonesia. In August 2019, she submitted her PhD thesis about the role of landscape concepts in a dispute over tourism development in Northern Bali (supervised by Prof. Dr. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Prof. Dr. Andrea Lauser), which she defended in January 2020. After finishing her studies in Social Anthropology, Physical Anthropology and Conservation Biology (Magistra Artium) in Göttingen and Uppsala (Sweden) with a thesis on conflicts over water resources in the context of South Balinese paddy cultivation, she received a PhD scholarship at the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion at the University of Halle-Wittenberg from 2008-2012. Since her first fieldwork experience in Bali in 2003, she has returned to the island for several long-term research and academic stays, among them a one-year ethnographic fieldwork for her dissertation. Her main research interests are socio-environmental conflicts, the anthropology of landscape and space, political ecology, relations of humans and the environment, ecotourism, agrarian crisis and alternative forms of agriculture (e.g. organic horticulture and paddy cultivation) as a part of the environmental movement in Indonesia, climate change, activism, anthropology of the future, anthropology of sustainability. .

Dissertation project (defended in January 2020): „Wie heilig sind Wald und Wasser? Die Rolle von Landschaftskonzepten im Disput um Tourismusentwicklung in einem Naturschutzgebiet in Nordbali, Indonesien“ (The role of landscape concepts in a dispute over tourism development in a nature reserve in Northern Bali, Indonesia) Link