Marie Ladekjær Gravesen

Primary research areas

Marie Ladekjær Gravesen's overall work pertains to conflicts over access to natural resources. More specifically, she has worked with climate change adaptation, dynamics of boundaries and fencing, new pastoral frontiers, how ethnicity plays into the formation of land claims, and how land-use regimes and claims can become politicized and escalate into open conflict.

Current research

Marie Ladekjær Gravesen's work is empirically and historically grounded while employing a wide range of methodologies from qualitative anthropological inquiries, to archival usage and geographical information systems. In general, she has been driven by a curiosity of how the micro scale of experiences, such as an exchange or transaction, may be related to the macro scale of state policies, political interference, alliances, competition, or a perceived history of marginalization.

Projects

Marie Ladekjær Gravesen has been engaged in collaborative scholarly projects in a number of contexts from East to West Africa.

At DIIS, Marie is currently working on the FFU funded GAP programme, focusing on the political economy of funds that are channelled into climate change adaptation in Kenya and Tanzania - inquiring into which institutions are involved and who makes decisions on the route of the funds from macro levels to local (sub-)county implementation levels in Turkana and Makueni counties. She has also recently worked in the programme "Governing Climate Mobility" focusing on local contexts in Ghana and Ethiopia, and a range of studies for the Danish Ministry of Foreign affairs on the integration of climate change adaptation and development.

Recently, she has collaborated with colleagues at Malmö University to work on the role of temporality in qualitative research, and at Aarhus University, to undertake studies into rapid as well as long-term changes in fencing practices in Maasai Mara and Laikipia in Kenya.

Her doctorate work looked at the politics of land conflicts in Kenya’s Laikipia County. The work explored the background for the 2016-17 pre-election violence and land invasions in the area - including their legal nature, narratives of resistance and division, political incitement and outright violent attacks. This work has culminated into several academic publications, including her monograph ‘The Contested Lands of Laikipia - Histories of Claims and Conflict in a Kenyan Landscape’, published in November 2020. 

She undertook her doctoral work at Cologne University under the Marie Curie research programme ‘Resilience in East African Landscapes’, funded by the European Commission. She has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University, the Centre of African Studies at Copenhagen University, the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, and had numerous shorter research stays to carry out archival work in Oxford and London.