Dr Christina Woolner

My research broadly explores how forms of popular art and practices of ‘voicing’ are entangled in processes of sociopolitical transformation, especially in the wake of violence. Put another way, I am interested in how words, as language and sound, shape how people relate to themselves and others. Inspired by work in anthropology, ethnomusicology and sound studies, my research considers the political and affective affordances of ‘the voice’ as both a sonic thing and a social phenomenon. For the last decade, my ethnographic focus has been Somaliland, where I have worked with poets, musicians, singers, politicians and cultural activists to understand the power of music and oral poetry to shape both everyday intimate relationships and state-level processes of change.

I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, where I carried out research on the social and political lives of love songs in contemporary Somaliland. In a setting where both music making and speaking about love are contested affairs, my research considered how the intimacies distilled and opened by love songs are both personally transformative and politically salient. I locate the intimacy-opening power of love songs in the deeply personal yet multivocal ‘voice’ that animates songs. During my fieldwork, I recorded and produced a podcast episode about Somaliland’s first postwar music venue, available here. My research on love songs has been published in American Ethnologist and Ethnomusicology, and in my first monograph Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland (Chicago, 2023). More information about my monograph is available in this interview, and via the book’s companion website.

Shifting my focus from the personal to (more overtly) political, as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, I carried out a study of a 2017 poetry debate known as ‘Miimley’. Miimley featured dozens of poets who debated issues of government corruption and Somaliland’s democratic trajectory in poems shared via Facebook and YouTube. In addition to the commentary about Somaliland’s political landscape that the debate provides, I considered how shifting poetic practices both reflect and help to shape broader gendered and generational ideas of voice, subjectivity, and political belonging—or, to borrow from Rancière, how a “(re)distribution of the sensible” may itself be a form of politics. During my fieldwork I recorded a conversation with the poet who initiated Miimley about ‘voice’ and poetic authority, available here. Several publications about this project are forthcoming.

Building on my work in Somaliland, I am currently carrying out research with diaspora Somali poets in the UK, with a focus on how the ‘desert’ is evoked in word and sound in both Somali- and English language verse. This research is part of an interdisciplinary project Desert Disorders, which aims to recentre arid regions within a comparative, global perspective, using historical, literary and ethnographic methodologies to challenge presumptions of these spaces as perceived disorder. Headed by PI Katherine Baxter (Northumbria), the project examines two cases studies, Somaliland and the Thar desert, through collaboration with Professor Deborah Sutton (Lancaster University) and Professor Farhana Ibrahim (IIT Delhi).

My research builds on my interdisciplinary training in social anthropology and peace studies, and a longstanding practice-informed interest in the role of storytelling in war and peacebuilding processes, initially inspired by personal encounters and resettlement work with various refugee communities in Canada. I have worked with a variety of peace research organizations in Canada and Africa – including Project Ploughshares (Ontario) the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (Cape Town) and the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Hargeysa. My teaching experience spans several disciplines and continents: I have taught peace studies and global studies in Canada and Somaliland, as well as lectured and supervised students in anthropology, ethnomusicology and African Studies in the UK. In addition to an MPhil (2014) and PhD (2018) in Social Anthropology from Cambridge, I hold an MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame (2010), and a BA in Global Studies and Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University (2007).

Research Projects

• Transforming Political Subjectivities in Somaliland