"Innovation Culture: Aligning Invention, Change, and Promise in Stockholm’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem";"Ethnographic Exploratory";"2026-06-12";"14:00";"";"15:30";"Faculty of Social Sciences, building 4, room 4.1.12, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen";"Talk with Angela Vandenbroek.";"Talk with Angela Vandenbroek. This talk proposes “innovation culture” as a way of understanding how entrepreneurial ecosystems coordinate and manipulate entrepreneurial practices and decision making through the management of conceptual ambiguity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem, I will examine how these ecosystems deploy the concept of innovation in multiple ways. Innovation is deployed both as innovation-as-invention—referring to the technical and material production of novel ventures, products, services, and markets—and as innovation-as-change, which emphasizes catalyzing shifts in social practice, meaning, and relations toward desirable futures. The slippages between the two are further obscured by innovation-as-promise—a promissory discourse that subtly conflates invention with change at key stages of venture development, aligning entrepreneurs’ ambitions for meaningful change with venture capital values and logics. I aim to demonstrate how innovation culture uncritically renders these alignments as immutable, even as many entrepreneurs experience growing dissonance between the promised futures of their ambition and the outcomes of their practices."
"Nutritional Citizenship: Anticipation and Responsibility in Childhood Malnutrition Programs in Colombia";"Department of Anthropology";"2026-06-18";"15:00";"2026-06-18";"18:00";"Faculty of Social Sciences, room 2.0.63, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen. The defence is also available online. <a href=""https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/62192480488?pwd=VXhy6Ose3dhA0RkmfYjYK4vR4QXmN0.1"">Find Zoom link here</a>. Meeting ID: 621 9248 0488. Passcode: 097340.";"Public PhD defence by Vladimir Ariza-Montañez.";"Public PhD defence by Vladimir Ariza-Montañez. Abstract This article-based PhD dissertation explores how state and humanitarian efforts to improve child nutrition and care in Colombia redistribute responsibilities for children’s survival, growth, and future development between institutions and families, with particular attention to the Colombia–Venezuela border region. Focusing on early childhood health and nutrition programs informed by contemporary global health agendas such as the First 1,000 Days framework, the study examines how interventions are no longer conceived solely as forms of immediate protection, but as investments oriented toward future returns for the child, the family, and the nation. Within this paradigm, caregivers, especially mothers, become central actors in securing not only children’s present well-being but also their future potential. I conceptualize this sociomaterial redistribution of care, risk, and responsibility as nutritional citizenship. The research draws on three ethnographic case studies conducted in Yopal, Puerto Carreño, and Cúcuta, cities across the broader Colombia–Venezuela border region and characterized by high rates of malnutrition, fragile infrastructures, Indigenous communities, and migrant/floating populations. These case studies include an ambulatory nutritional care initiative, a Nutritional Rehabilitation Center, and a preterm Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) program. Fieldwork was conducted across three periods of engagement with varying degrees of temporal immersion and combined sustained observation of care practices, semi-structured interviews with caregivers, health professionals, coordinators, and program participants, as well as documentary analysis of policy documents, technical guidelines, operational manuals, and nutritional protocols. Using a sociomaterial analytical approach, the dissertation focuses on how caregivers and health workers engage with practices such as anthropometric monitoring, therapeutic feeding, breastfeeding, and skin-to-skin contact. These routine practices do more than manage malnutrition or prevent neonatal complications; they constitute the mother-child dyad as the fundamental unit of intervention and become key sites where care, risk, and responsibility are negotiated. Rather than operating only at a discursive or normative level, the redistribution of responsibilities is materially enacted through these low-tech devices, bodily routines, and intimate forms of care. In this way, state-led health and nutrition interventions become materially sustained by women’s largely invisible caregiving labor, as institutional expectations of securing the child’s “good future” ultimately rest on their shoulders. Assessment committee Associate Professor Helle Samuelsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair) Associate Professor Emily Yates-Doerr, Oregon State University, USA Senior Lecturer Michelle Pentecost, King’s College London, United Kingdom Supervisors Professor Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Professor Stine Krøijer, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (co-supervisor) Moderator Associate Professor Birgit Bräuchler, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Email address to gain access to the thesis: vam@amthro.ku.dk. You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy. After the defence, the department will host an informal reception in the Ethnographic Exploratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, building 4, room 4.1.12."
"Matters of Law: Archives, Evidence, and the Production of Accountability in the Syrian War";"Department of Anthropology";"2026-08-04";"14:00";"2026-08-04";"17:00";"Faculty of Social Sciences, room 35.01.06, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen. The defence will also be streamed online (link will follow).";"Public PhD defence by Petya Mitkova Koleva.";"Public PhD defence by Petya Mitkova Koleva. Abstract International criminal justice – as a system of laws and a field of practice – was conceived as a modality to address the legacy of conflict by bringing perpetrators of war time violence to account in a court of law. In recent years, as conflicts have increasingly become internationalised and that much harder to resolve, the field has shifted its focus from post-conflict contexts to situations of active warfare. Empirically anchored in the Syrian case, Matters of Law offers an ethnographic account of this shift through the experiences of a group of Syrian and international investigators whose work of collecting an archive of Syrian security intelligence documents grants them frontline perspectives on the ways in which international legal norms operate in chronic conflict and amid institutional decline. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the work traces the trajectory of the records in this archive from the battlefields of Syria to European jurisdictions and attends to the practices, logics and mental models that transform instruments of state violence into legal evidence. By exploring the changing affordances of these records across time and space, Matters of Law draws out the social and political relations which shape how the materiality of violence is given legal meaning in a dynamic context of internationalised warfare. As such, the dissertation works towards anthropology of legal becoming by expecting the conditions under which the law was brought to bear on the Syrian context. Probing the politics of archiving and the stakes of legal knowledge production, Matters of Law seeks to offer an understanding of the possibilities, limits and implications of seeking recourse through international law in active conflict. By raising questions about time, space and legal knowledge, Matters of Law thus seeks to offer a contribution to the anthropologies of crisis, chronicity, international criminal law, archives and evidence. Assessment committee Professor Atreyee Sen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair) Associate Professor Elizabeth Drexler, Michigan State University, USA Associate Professor Maria Sapignoli, University of Milan, Italy Supervisor Professor Henrik Vigh, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Moderator Associate Professor Anja Simonsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark After the defence, the department will host an informal reception in the Ethnographic Exploratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, building 4, room 4.1.12. "