Student Assistant Lin Nagels
Nagels completed both her Bachelor's in Anthropology at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, with a concurrent focus on Philosophy during their undergraduate studies. Her Bachelor's thesis was titled "Die Krise der Repräsentation und die Schwierigkeiten der anthropologischen Epistemologie – Das Beispiel der dialogischen Ethnographie,".
Nagels pursued a Master’s in Anthropology, where her thesis research focused on "Migration, flight, and the role of photography in transnational family relations,".
Master's Thesis
Migration, Flight, and the Role of Photography in Transnational Family Relations: Negotiating belonging, proximity, and intimacy within the in-between
Many transnational families live a family life at long distance, across borders, and nations. This is particularly the case in context of flight and displacement. In order to bridge this physical distance and to produce and reproduce relationships, intimacy and proximity, it requires certain practices and objects as well as time and effort.
Since its invention, photography has been used by families to keep in touch, to remember intimate moments, and to reproduce this intimacy in times of spatial distance. The research, on which this thesis is based, draws on a fieldwork with four refugee women and their distant family members and explores how photography as practice, and the photograph as object offers a way to cope with separation and flight. It will be investigated if and how photography allows a possibility to negotiate belonging and intimacy between different places and people, how it produces and reproduces relationships across distance and, by this, enables to dwell in a new context. The focus, throughout the thesis, will be on family photographs, which will be conceptualized as affective multi-sensuous objects which not only depict family relationships but, as objects with agency, act within them.