Dan Hirslund is an anthropologist from The University of Copenhagen. After spending a year at the University of British Columbia in preparation for his BA, Dan returned to Copenhagen to study the politics of conflict in South Asia - a theme that has occupied him ever since.
His first ethnographic fieldwork was in Sri Lanka during 2000, studying northern Muslims displaced by the civil war. After finishing his MA, Dan worked for the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims and the Danish Red Cross supporting projects for asylum seekers.
Between 2008 and 2012, Dan pursued his doctorate at the University of Copenhagen investigating the dynamics of post-revolutionary Maoism in Nepal. Theoretically, his interest lay with understanding revolutionary subjectivities and the changing role political sacrifice had taken as a trope and structure of political culture. His doctoral thesis examined the role of young Maoist cadres in the post-conflict phase and their complicated relationship towards political change, rival youth and their own transformation into revolutionary subjects.
Since completing his PhD, Dan has increasingly been interested in connecting the political culture of post-conflict Nepal with the economic structure of class relationships and the transformation wrecked by the country’s increasing integration into the global economy. In late 2014, Dan received a grant to study the solidarities of debt that characterize precariat labor in urban industries. The aim is to further our understanding of the intricate webs of class entanglement for the urban poor who depend for their survival on credit from multiple sources and to probe the contradictory ways through which money establishes alliances - within and across class, caste, kin and ethnic affiliation.
Dan Hirslund’s postdoc project is anchored at the Department of Cross Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen where he has just moved on March 1, 2015. At LSE, Dan’s project is connected to the Inequality and Poverty Program headed by Dr. Alpa Shah. Dan will be affiliated with the department until June 2017 and will be spending the winter semester in 2016 at the department.