Jaanika Vider is currently a REWIRE Fellow at the University of Vienna, and a former research fellow at the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University. She is a historical anthropologist with particular interest in visual and material collections in archives and museums, and the anthropology of the North. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford where she focused on the career of an early female anthropologist, Maria Czaplicka, the expedition she led to North Central Siberia in 1914, and the museum collections born out of this expedition and their place in the history of anthropology. Her research in Estonia is concerned with the development of cultural tourism in Ida-Virumaa.
Jaanika’s research concerns itself with the relationship between anthropology and collecting. She has a specific interest in histories of collections in museums and in exploring ways in which ethnographic fieldwork, archival and collections-based research, and display practices can be brought together to activate historic collections and to connect museum audiences with broader issues prevalent among contemporary source communities.
Selected publications
Jaanika Vider, '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, March 2021, Pages 111–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhaa018
