Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

Petra Tjitske is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology based in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Manchester. Her research draws on insights from ecological anthropology, materiality, and performance studies to explore skilled manifestations of human curiosity, simulation, and rhetoric. She is the author of Crafting ‘the Indian’: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment (Berghahn Books, 2012). Petra Tjitske currently leads a multi-sited ESRC-funded project, ‘Mimesis in action: nuclear decommissioning as conceptual playground for societal and ecological future making’ (2022 – 2026), pursuing her interest in human engagement with models, landscapes, and temporalities in areas of long-term nuclear waste management. Read more about Petra Tjitske. Sarah O’Brien is working with Petra Tjitske on her new ESRC-funded project Mimesis in Action. The project investigates future-making in areas of nuclear decommissioning and nuclear waste management. Read more about Sarah O’Brien.

See publications from The Beam team

Special Nuclear Materials – those fissile isotopes from which spring all the promise and the peril in the ‘nuclear’

Exploring entanglements and tensions that arise between ‘the repetitive’ and ‘the sustainable’ in nuclear discourse

‘Mimesis in Action: Nuclear decommissioning as conceptual playground for societal and ecological future making’ is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

The Beam launches interdisciplinary postgraduate module

Core concepts of social life are reinvented or reinforced during Covid-19.

The Beam visits ‘x=2140’, a fascinating exhibition born from the Sellafield site futures project.

Petra reflects on the workshops held to invigorate the discussion of possible end-states for the Sellafield site by the year 2140.

Led by The University of Manchester, this project considers Sellafield’s possible end states.

Surrounded by overwhelmingly positive attitudes studying ‘the nuclear’ in West Cumbria, ethnographer Petra finds a counter-narrative.