Dr
Rebekah Plueckhahn
I am an anthropologist studying temporality, sociality and emerging ethics as people negotiate access to shifting urban infrastructures, housing finance and engage in emerging politics and performance. I am a Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork in both rural and urban Mongolia has formed the bedrock of my research. I have published on anthropologies of capitalism/s, morality, causality, dwelling, sociality, environmental stigma and financialisation. My current research explores how lower-mid income residents in Ulaanbaatar shape the city through dwelling, owning and circulations of debt between kin and acquaintances when buying housing, and how they negotiate uncertain infrastructural atmospheres and relations of power. Part of this research appears in my 2020 monograph Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia – Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux published with UCL Press. My previous research in rural west Mongolia is on the intersubjective experience of performance and social aesthetics as people attempt to bring good futures into being in the face of environmental and economic uncertainty.