Kiri Santer is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, currently working on a new project that will track the implementations of reforms being carried out on the European Union's emissions trading system, with a focus on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Her research examines the ways in which policy and industry actors navigate the dual requirements of emission reduction and imperatives of growth. She is interested in the tensions between different normative orders that govern carbon markets, the practices and logics of regulators and the implementation of carbon pricing mechanisms.
She received her PhD Summa cum Laude from the University of Bern in 2022. Her PhD examined the politics of accountability in the outsourcing of migration control in the Central Mediterranean. It won the Phil-Hist Faculty Award at the University of Bern for the best dissertation of 2021/2022, the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) 2023 Award and the 2023 IMISCOE Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award. For her doctoral research she was awarded a Doc.ch grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and conducted field work in Tunisia, Brussels, Rome and the Central Mediterranean. She was a 2019/2020 research fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome and a visiting researcher at the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis in 2018. .
Kiri has an MA in Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. Previously, she studied Anthropology, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the universities of Geneva, Neuchâtel and Toronto.
Her research and teaching interests include legal anthropology, transnational law, governance and norm production, political ecology, human rights, critical migration and border studies.
Kiri Santer is co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory
