Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Jaanika Vider is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. Her MSCA CoFund REWIRE postdoctoral research project “Capturing the Arctic” examines the ethnographic representation of the Arctic. It traces the emergence and development of the anthropological discourse about these areas and asks how ethnographic knowledge about the North has been made and popularized.
 
Vider’s research lies at the intersection of museum studies, visual and material anthropology and history. She received her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2018 where her research examined early 20th century British Anthropology through a biographical focus on Maria Czaplicka and her Siberian collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum bringing into focus the role of women fieldworkers, international and interdisciplinary networks, forces that shaped Czaplicka’s Siberian fieldwork and the role of museum collections in this past.

Vider is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History where she is collaborating on the "Arctic Indigenous Historical Imagery at the National Anthropological Archives" project. She is also Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where she continues to collaborate on the re-display of the Czaplicka collection, and a member of the ICOM Estonia provenance research working group.

Selected Publications

• Vider, J. 2022. Translating the Field. Vis Anthropol Rev, 38: 8-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12258
• Vider, J. 2021. Lady scientist, technological treasures and the making of a discipline: Re-assembling the histories of the Czaplicka collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Journal of the History of Collections,Volume 33, Issue 1, Pages 111–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhaa018
• Vider, J. 2020. Towards future-orientated museums. International Committee for Museums of Ethnography(ICME) Newsletter, 89 (1), 23−24.
• Vider, J. 2020. REVIEW of Banta, Melissa and Curtis M. Hinsley with Joan Kathryn O'Donnell “From site to sight: anthropology, photography, and the power of imagery” (thirtieth anniversary edition). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 26: 1