Engaged Encounters

Oscar Salemink has co-edited the open access book ‘Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten’.

Engaged Encounters is a festschrift celebrating the scholarly, professional and personal contributions and insights of Monique Nuijten, who spent 2011 as a fellow at the Department of Anthropology in Copenhagen.

As a creative scholar, Monique is known for her theoretical contributions to the study of development, social movements, the state, organisations, and corruption - to name a few topics. She inspires many senior and junior colleagues, as well as students, with innovative concepts like 'force fields' and development as a 'hope-generating machine'.

Nuijten grounds her theoretical interventions in fine-grained ethnographic observations with a keen and sympathetic eye for the diverse actors that inhabit the structures of power and patterns of inequality she encounters. For Nuijten, theoretical and ethnographic endeavors are deeply interwoven with personal and political engagements, most recently illustrated through her research on social movements in urban settings in Brazil and Spain.

The intersection of these three integrated dimensions in Monique Nuijten's oeuvre and life – the theoretical, collegial and personal – are brought out clearly in the forty contributions that each in their own way, acknowledge her unique combination of intellectual sharpness and personal warmth. As such, Monique Nuijten's scholarly life embodies an exemplary model of engaged scholarship.

In addition to Professor Oscar Salemink, Associate Professor Stine Krøijer contributed a chapter, as did the former PhD Student Regnar Kristensen.

The book can be downloaded here: Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten