Marthe Achtnich

Research Affiliate

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Biography

Marthe is a Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and at COMPAS, University of Oxford. She was a Fellow by Examination in Anthropology (Junior Research Fellow, JRF) at Magdalen College (2018-2021), and Senior Demy at Magdalen College (2021-2022). Prior to this, she was a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in Brussels, Belgium. Marthe holds a DPhil in Anthropology and an MPhil in Migration Studies, both from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.

Marthe is an anthropologist of migration and mobility, interested in the lived experiences, governance and economies of migration. She focuses on the journeys of migrants to and through Libya to Europe and has conducted in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with migrants in Libya and in Malta. This has resulted in a monograph on migrants’ journeys and economies in Libya and Europe’s borderlands (Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean), forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Her most recent work examines the ‘bioeconomy’ and new economic spaces surrounding mobile bodies and migrants’ lives.

Selected publications

Achtnich, M. (2022) Waiting to move on: migration, borderwork and mobility economies in Libya. Geopolitics 27(5), pp. 1376-1389.

Achtnich, M. (2022) Mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of mobility. Cultural Anthropology 37(1), pp. 1-8.

Achtnich, M. (2022) Bioeconomy and migrants’ lives in Libya. Cultural Anthropology 37(1), pp. 9–15.

Achtnich, M. (2022) Accumulation by immobilization: migration, mobility and money in Libya. Economy and Society 51(1), pp. 95-115.

Achtnich, M. (2021) Bordering practices: migrants, mobility and affect in Libya. American Ethnologist 48(3), pp. 314-326.

Achtnich, M. (2021) Immobility and crisis: rethinking migrants’ journeys through Libya to Europe. Libyan Studies, 1-5.

Achtnich, M. (2020) Shifting shelters: migrants, mobility and the making of open centres in Malta. In: Scott-Smith, T. & Breeze, M. E. (eds.) Structures of protection? Rethinking refugee shelter, pp. 45-55. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books