Marie Rask Bjerre Odgaard

I have been collaborating with artists and activists in Amman, Jordan, for almost a decade. During this time, I have conducted fieldwork and written extensively on the intersection of art and activism in Jordan. My work has spanned topics as gender and sexuality, ethics and morality in what I refer to as the arts of living queerly, the ethical dimensions of anthropology, and more recently, approaches to playfulness and reparation in both artistic practice and anthropological writing. My work has engaged artists based in Jordan, as well as those that are based in Europe and North America, with a focus on contemporary issues within the Arab Middle East from a Jordanian perspective.

Currently, I am exploring playful ways of imagining and nurturing alternative possibilities within the in-between spaces between the actual and the potential in everyday life in Jordan. In addition to sociocultural anthropology, my research draws inspiration and integrates insights from critical studies, phenomenology, feminist and queer scholarship, as well as art and literature. Among my ongoing writing-projects, I am developing a book manuscript tentatively titled A Staircase between the Sun and the Moon: The Arts of Living Queerly in Amman.

Central to my projects are:

1. Centering the queer, reparative, and playful dimensions of people’s lives amidst challenging social and political contexts,

2. Contributing to an ethics of possibility and potentiality grounded in first-person perspectives and artistic approaches to understanding the human condition,

3. Developing an ethnographically informed, interdisciplinary methodology that is built on an ethics of artful hesitation and an awareness of how our worlds can transform through sustained relationships built on trust and experimentation.