The Social Anthropology Unit is happy to welcome Maria Coma and Albina Muratbekova in Fribourg.

Maria Coma is a doctoral researcher at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France. Dr. Albina Muratbekova joined the Roadwork project for 3 months.

Maria Coma is a doctoral researcher at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France. She has a background in Social Anthropology and Tibetan studies and her research interests include more-than-human relationships, multispecies ethnography, and environmental change. Since 2016 and as part of her dissertation project, she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among mobile pastoralists of North Eastern Tibet. She is a University of Fribourg’s doctoral scholarship holder for the spring semester 2021-22. Her research at the Social Anthropology Unit of the Department of Social Sciences focuses on how the expansion of transport infrastructure impacts the lives of Tibetan pastoralists and their herd animals.

Albina Muratbekova received her PhD and MSc from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. In her dissertation, Albina investigated China-India relation in border areas from global, regional and sub-regional perspectives. During her studies, she won a EUCACIS PhD support programme fellowship supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and Erasmus+, the Fudan University Fellowship in International Politics (Chinese Politics and Diplomacy), an ITEC (India) programme fellowship, along with being a visiting student and research affiliate at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, University of Cambridge.