Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard is a Professor and Vice Head of Department at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (UiB), Faculty of Social Sciences. Her academic work is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Andes (Peru), the Arctic (Svalbard, Norway), and in the control rooms of Norwegian maritime industries.

• PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (2007)
• MA in Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (1999)

Her research interests lie at the intersection of territorial politics, labor, technology, gender, indigeneity, and landscape in the Anthropocene. She has extensively studied urban migration in Peru, focusing on how Andean migrants negotiate identity, gender, and indigeneity in urban settings, culminating in her monograph Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities (2010). Her recent work explores post-extractivism, sovereignty, and ownership in the Arctic and Andes, and the impacts of automation in the maritime sector. She leads the Research Council of Norway-funded project ASMOG on the automation shift in offshore industries.

Her publications reveal a consistent focus on the politics of place, labor, and knowledge in contexts of extractivism, borderlands, and technological change. Key themes include the moralities of markets, indigenous life projects, frontier formations, and the digitalization of the ocean. Her work bridges Latin American and Arctic studies, emphasizing global processes of marginalization, resistance, and reconfiguration of human-nonhuman relations.

Her scientific contributions include co-editing influential volumes on extractivism and indigenous ownership, and numerous peer-reviewed articles on topics such as social banditry, border multiplicities, and post-carbon utopias in Svalbard.

She has supervised multiple PhD and MA students in social anthropology and related fields, and has been actively involved in pedagogical development at UiB. She leads and participates in several research groups, including 'Human Futures' and 'Political Ecologies,' and is part of the Svalbard Social Science Initiative. Her current projects focus on indigenous forms of ownership and the social implications of automation in maritime industries.

She has held visiting positions, including as an Affiliated Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Manchester's Center for Studies of Socio-cultural Change (CRESC).