Anna Bloom-Christen

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Anna Bloom-Christen is an anthropologist with a background in philosophy. She is interested in how individuals articulate togetherness, how attention evolves through shared action, and how these alignments fracture in divided societies. Her philosophical training informs her approach to scrutinizing the foundational theories and methodologies of anthropology. 

Her current project, Transformation of What? at the Rhodes Philosophy Department investigates how colonial gatekeeping structures impact South African “first gens”– that is, students who are the first in their families to pursue higher education. Employing a critical phenomenological approach, she is working on a book-length study on debate culture in divided societies.

For her PhD, Anna examined the role of intentions for shared actions in cross-cultural social settings. Drawing on a year of participatory fieldwork on foot, she explored local styles of walking together in post-apartheid South Africa as performances of reclaiming public space. Her first book, Walking Together: Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up, is forthcoming with Routledge (preview and endorsements).