DANIELA KRAEMER

Research Assistant Professor

Anthropology Department, The University of New Mexico

CURRENT ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Urban adoption practices This research examines how urban adoption is an intentional strategy used by families to mitigate their household’s future economic success and stability. But, this research asks, what happens to this ‘security’ when the adoption relationship fails?

Urban strategies for economic success This research examines different strategies ni-Vanuatu employ to achieve economic success in Port Vila, Vanuatu where cost of living, rates of unemployment, and urban poverty are all high.

PAST ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Reteritorializing place through reggae Reggae music is ubiquitous throughout Oceania. This research examined the centrality of playing and consuming reggae music and culture in the place making practices of youth in Port Vila an urban context in which their ancestors did not belong.

Transforming urban social relationships This research examined different ways social relationships in Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital and largest urban centre, are transforming - both gender relationships and relationships in the household. Some of the topics this research explored included: how urban youth use mobile phones to broaden their urban social networks; how the materiality of the mobile phone influences the kind of urban social relationships emerging; how unemployed young men are excluded from household meals due to their lack of “contribution”; and how urban young women, tired of patriarchal relationships, form their own women-only households.

Practices of urban place making and belonging How do marginalised young men, part of the first generation of ni-Vanuatu born in an urban context, create belonging, identity and place ? My research explored young men’s pioneering of an urban identity and their efforts and strategies to legitimise town as a category of place to which they can belong.

Paid Domestic workers in Vanuatu This research examined the intersection of gender, race and labour in the relationships between ni-Vanuatu paid domestic workers and their French, English and ni-Vanuatu employers. I argued that employers justified exploiting their paid domestic workers through constructions of racial, gender and class difference.