c:o/re Fellow 10/26 – 09/27
Anna Bloom-Christen is an anthropologist and philosopher of social science. Her research examines methods of knowledge production as epistemic and culturally situated practices. Combining philosophical analysis with ethnographic inquiry, she asks what established methods presuppose, and how they are shaped by the lifeworlds in which they are employed.
Her earlier work addresses participant observation, its epistemological foundations, and the role of embodied participation in ethnographic knowledge production. Her book Walking Together extends this methodological critique through walking together as a research method, philosophical practice, and paradigmatic social phenomenon. In Aachen, she brings this methodological scrutiny to academic philosophy itself. Approaching philosophy ethnographically, she investigates the everyday practices through which epistemic authority is negotiated.
Anna holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Basel and an MLitt in Philosophy from the University of St Andrews. She has held postdoctoral positions at UCLA, Rhodes University, and the University of St. Gallen.
Transformation of What? Institutional Culture and Epistemic Repair in South African Higher Education
How to transform a university towards greater equity? Across the globe, institutional transformation has often been measured in terms of access: who enters the university, who graduates, and who succeeds on the job market. Yet demographic change alone does not necessarily transform the everyday practices through which knowledge is produced, authority is granted, and belonging is negotiated.Where inherited institutional forms and the everyday practices attached to them remain largely intact, colonial continuities can persist despite demographic transformation.
Transformation of What? examines this tension through the lived experiences of first-generation philosophy students in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Philosophy Department at Rhodes University, the project investigates how students and lecturers listen, respond, disagree, and recognize one another as intellectual interlocutors. It draws on participant observation, interviews, and walk-alongs to study philosophy not simply as a body of ideas, but as a culturally and institutionally situated social practice of knowledge production.
A main working concept for this project is attention. Attentional habits shape what becomes perceptible in academic encounters, whose contributions are recognized, and which forms of participation remain backgrounded. The project therefore asks how apparently minor norms of interaction and routine academic practices can reproduce established hierarchies – but also reconfigure them.
Rather than understanding transformation as the inclusion of new participants within traditional structures, the project approaches it as a possible form of epistemic repair: a reorientation of the relations through which people recognize one another as participants in a shared intellectual world. By examining philosophy as a concrete variety of science in post-apartheid South Africa, the project also opens onto broader questions about how research cultures evolve along with their practitioners – and, ultimately, whom and what universities are for.
Publications (selection)
Bloom-Christen, A. (2026). Walking Together: Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up. Routledge Advances in Research Methods. London: Routledge.
Bloom-Christen, A. (2024). What Matters to Others: A High-Threshold Account of Joint Attention. Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy 43: 337–348.
Bloom-Christen, A. (2024). Die Anthropologie des Körpers als Forschungspraxis der Anerkennung. In Körper und Anerkennung: Der Leib in der Dynamik des Sozialen, edited by E. Hirschmann, 49–71. Campus.
Bloom-Christen, A. (2023). Knowing the City. Philosophy of the City Journal 1(1): 1–9. DOI: 10.21827/potcj.1.1.40776.
Bloom-Christen, A., and Hendrikje Grunow. (2022). What’s (in) a Vignette? History, Functions, and Development of an Elusive Ethnographic Sub-Genre. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology.