Eline Castelijns

Eline Castelijns is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, supported by a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2022. She is affiliated with the NIG research institute and based in Vienna, Austria.

Her education includes a BBA in Public Administration and an MSc in International Development Studies, focusing on sociology and anthropology of development, land issues, indigeneity, and power dynamics in Southern Africa. Her PhD project examines rural residents' engagements with large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) in Zambia's Central Province, analyzing agricultural, mining, and infrastructural land grabs through a political ecology lens.

Her research interests center on land grabbing, heterogeneity in landscapes, and power relationships in Zambia and Southern Africa. She employs ethnographic methods to document marginalized voices and entangled socio-ecological processes in resource-intensive development projects.

Awards:

• DOC Fellowship (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2022–2024)

Labs/Teams: Active in the University of Vienna's Social and Cultural Anthropology research community, focusing on critical development studies and political ecology.