Steffen Johannessen
associated Ph.D. student (Scholarship holder 08/2005 - 07/2008)
Contact
Steffen F. Johannessen
Hammergata 9 C
0465 Oslo, Norwegen
phone: 0047 45120129
steffen.johannessen@bi.no
Chagossian exile in Mauritius and beyond
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Schnepel
The focus of the project concerns the community of displaced Chagossians now residing on the outskirts of the Mauritian capital Port Louis. In the early 1970s the total population of the Chagos Archipelago was expelled and exiled to Mauritius and the Seychelles due to the construction of a joint UK-US military base on its largest island, Diego Garcia. Through their ongoing struggles for compensations and the right to return the former inhabitants have now come to constitute a highly organized Diaspora. The ongoing research project looks into the context of Chagossian struggles and their present forms resistance and aims at exploring the production and reproduction of Chagossian locality. Questions of particular interest relate to politics of identifications, how societies remember and forget through performances, how representations of the past and conceptions of places are negotiated in present contexts for political purposes, and how people mobilize and identify along ethnic lines within and beyond the context of the Mauritian ‘multicultural nationalism'.
The project is based on a two years Ph.D. grant sponsored by the International Graduate School of University of Halle, located within the section for Asian and African Studies headed by Professor Dr. Jürgen Paul. The project is supervised by Professor Dr. Burkhard Schnepel.
Curriculum Vitae
| 2005 spring | Social Anthropology master-programme*, University of Oslo |
| 2003 spring | Life-view and Ethics, semester unit, University of Trondheim |
| 2002 autumn | Social Anthropology, intermediate subject, University of Oslo |
| 2002 spring | Sociology, foundation subject, University of Oslo |
| 2000 autumn | Philosophy, foundation subject, University of Oslo |
| 1999 autumn | Social Anthropology, foundation subject, University of Oslo |
| 1998 autumn | Examen Philosophicum and Examen Facultatum (Social science variant), University of Oslo |
* Empirical research: Port Louis, Mauritius. 5 months