19.12.2023Guest at ISEK - Social Anthropology Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 - Jérémie Voirol

Jérémie Voirol is developing at the ISEK the BNF project ‘The ethics of enjoyment: the case of Indigenous people in a globalised world’, based on his previous research projects.

He holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne (2016) and has been a research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester since 2017. His PhD research looked at Indigenous people’s experiences of festivities in the Otavalo region of the Ecuadorian Andes and issues of playfulness, morality, exchanges, identity politics, cultural performances, race/racism, multiculturalism, and modernity. His postdoctoral project at the University of Manchester explores the multiple circulations (of people, objects, ideas, and sounds) that shape the contemporary musical expressions of Indigenous musicians from Otavalo (the so-called ‘traditional music’ scene, as well as global and youth genres) and their sense of Indigeneity, notably through music videos shared on social media.

From 2018 to 2023, Jérémie worked as a research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the ‘Good Life’ in Times of Crisis’, headed by Dr Valerio Simoni at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Within this research, he addressed how ideals of the ‘good life’ are articulated, (re)assessed, and related to specific places and contexts as a result of experiences of crisis and migration, focusing on the imaginaries and experiences of Ecuadorian migrants who came back to their homeland from Spain in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Jérémie has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural and urban areas of Ecuador since 2003 and also completed shorter research trips working with Latin American migrants in Spain and Switzerland. He uses audio-visual methods as well (he edited two ethnographic films and created a blog where he has posted short, edited videos).