Judith Hesse
C.V. | Current Project
Research Interests
Regimes of mobility, privileged mobilities, forced migration, global inequalities, anthropology of (im)mobility, (neo)colonialism
Research Area(s)
Panama, Latin America, Caribbean
Profile
Judith Hesse is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School Global and Area Studies at Leipzig University and the International Max Planck Research School Global Multiplicity. She focuses on processes of mobility and immobility as experienced by social actors with differing levels of mobility agency in Panama.
In her doctoral research she examines historical and contemporary (im)mobility dynamics in a multi-sited ethnographic approach, focusing on the entangled legacies of imperial-colonial influences, as well as the growth of global tourism and affluent lifestyle migration. Moreover, her research addresses the situation of refuge-seeking migrants en route through the Panamanian-Colombian borderland. By closely examining multi-layered forms of (im)mobility from the perspective of social actors, her dissertation aims to shed new light on the issue of entangled and unequal (im)mobilities in specific local contexts and its consequences for the global, contributing to the growing field of an anthropology of (im)mobility.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Hispanic Studies from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Latin America Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. In her master’s thesis she investigated the field of transnational lifestyle migration in the global context of unequal north-south migration patterns to Vilcabamba, Ecuador. She explored the question of individual motivation for migration and the challenges that emerge through a hyper-mobile migration dynamic towards a remote small-town community through a combination of on-site participant observation and narrative interviews with lifestyle migrants from the United States, Europe, and South Korea.