Edyta Roszko
Current projects
Conflict Enclosures
Completed projects
Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple mobilities in and out of the South China Sea
CMI-UiB: Commoning, Appropriation and Dispossession: Heritage as Claim Making
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Anthropologist with an interest in economic anthropology of oceans and coasts, spatial and socio-technical imaginaries of territory, climate change, markets, natural resources, and deep time.
Edyta Roszko is a Research Professor and social anthropologist at Chr. Michelsen Institute. Her expertise is grounded in East and Southeast Asia but with a global reach and theoretical ambition to advance our understanding of how societies process globalized economic and climate precarity. Edyta is a visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Copenhagen and a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, a pan-European initiative of outstanding young scientists for networking, advocacy, scientific exchange, and science policy. She currently serves as an associate editor for the Maritime Studies journal.
Edyta received her doctoral degree in social anthropology jointly from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Martin Luther University, Halle Wittenberg, Germany in 2011. Before joining Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen in 2019, she held academic positions at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Durham University (UK) and Academia Sinica (Taiwan). In 2019, Edyta was a Henry Lucy Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Center of Global Asia, New York Shanghai University, China. In 2024, she held a visiting professorship at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University in Australia.
Her research and publications revolve around the economic anthropology of oceans and coasts with specific interests in regimes of spatiality and temporality, spatial and socio-technical imaginaries of territory, climate change, markets, natural resources, Indigeneity, and geological time. Her broader theoretical interests seek to bridge the conceptual divide between land and sea by exploring the topics of oceans, mobility, migration and ecological changes, including climate change and sea level rise, in their deep historical and contemporary interconnections.
In the last fifteen years, Edyta’s research has been funded by various institutions such as Academia Sinica, Berlin Forum Transregionale Studien, Marie-Curie Sklodowska Actions – European Commission, the Danish Research Council for Independent Research, the British Economic and Social Research Council, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme and, more recently, by the European Research Council.
In January 2025 Edyta completed her European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea (TransOcean) at Chr. Michelsen Institute and currently she is working on her second book manuscript Oceans beyond Crime which explores the so-called organized fisheries crime in relation to and beyond the nation-state, security, and territorially bounded fisheries.
Her recently awarded ERC Consolidator Grant Global Hydroconnectivities beyond Oceans, Seas, and Rivers combines anthropology, archaeology, and geohydrology and contributes to the wider relevance in the era of climate change. It will examine how freshwater access facilitates human connections and integrates terrestrial and aquatic realms through a comparative historical ethnography of Austronesian speakers' Indigenous knowledge, spreading from Taiwan to Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific and spanning generations and cultures.
Edyta's monograph Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam was co-published by NIAS Press (October 2020) and the University of Hawai'i Press (March 2021) and in Open Access (October 2021). The Vietnamese translation of the book will be forthcoming in 2026. The interview about the book is available at New Books in Anthropology of the New Books Networks.
Fishers, Monks and Cadres was listed among 10 Best Book in Social Science by ICAS (International Convention of Asian Scholars) Book Prize 2021 for outstanding publications in the field of Asian Studies. The book has been also nominated for the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Social Science Book Prize 2022 and for Harry J. Benda Prize 2023.