Marta Vilar Rosales has been a Research Fellow at the ICS-ULisboa since 2014. She received her doctorate in Anthropology in 2007 from NOVA University of Lisbon, where she was a professor at the department of anthropology from 2007 to 2022. She has developed and coordinated ethnographic research in Angola, Mozambique, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia, and Portugal on contemporary migrations, material culture and everyday life. She is also interested in media anthropology in migratory contexts and food anthropology. She coordinates the PhD program on Migration Studies at ICS-ULisboa and the research project TRANSITS - Material Culture, Migration and Everyday Life. Presently, she is launching a new research project focusing on the present-day migration movements of the North American middle classes to Europe and, particularly, Portugal.
Research Fellow: Anthropology
Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon (UL)
Marta’s research focuses on contemporary transnational migrations, everyday life, material culture and domestic consumption practices. Her projects explore the intersections of the movements of people and things and the way in which they overlap and constitute each other. The house (and its things) is her preferred ethnographic context to investigate the processes of identity reconstruction, positioning strategies and policies of belonging of different migrant groups, through the analysis of their relationships with everyday things. She investigates large cities (like Lisbon, Luanda, Berlin, Toronto, and Sydney) as points of departure and arrival of people and things, as well as the cultural meetings that take place in them. Her research also prioritizes media contents concerning human movements, migratory policies, and representations (visual, textual) of migrants and of their communities and the way these contents contribute to the production and reification of notions about the other and his/her place in their different and multiple contemporary contexts of belonging.
Keywords: new migrations, materiality, senses, belonging, otherness