Soheila Shourbaji

Taking Croft to Market: The Trouble of Succession and Trading Land for Value in Rural Scotland

I am an economic anthropologist researching land, livestock, and auctions in the Scottish Highlands. My current doctoral research looks at crofting, a secure small-holding tenure system, and the social world that it creates. I am interested in the temporality of property and teleologies of enclosure through the ethnographic question of how the prospect of succession configures land use, and how tenured land enters, or rather is forged into, the 'land market'. Throughout my fieldwork, I delved further into the social binds of common grazing land, trading livestock at an auction mart, and the native breeds that shape the rural geography both in their presence and absence.

Supervisors: Karen Sykes and Michelle Obeid.

My project is funded by the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership of the Economic and Social Research Council.

My research trajectory starts from questions about how family businesses, or rather family work and kin-work, play a role in large industries. I have first investigated this question with small publishing houses in Lebanon and more recently with small-scale farmers on the west coast of Scotland. 

I conducted ethnographic research with a publisher in Lebanon for my MA in Anthropology (2022) at the American University of Beirut. I am currently working on developing a research paper on the problem of valuing book stock in the midst of an economic crisis. 

I am committed to work that challenges the normative flow of anthropological research, and I hope to contribute to land justice efforts around the world.

Talks and Presentations

The Binds of Crofting and Bounds of Imagining: How Crofters Constitute Crofts, Invited talk at the Anthropology Society in Lebanon, April 2025.

The House and the Other House: Kinship and Kin-work in Publishing, at Panel "Family as a safe haven? Families in social practice and narratives in times of crises," SIEF in the Czech Republic, June 2023.

I have conducted a short ethnographic study to support UCL RELIEF Centre's citizen scientist household survey (2019). The resulting working paper, Ambivalent Lines: Ethnographic Observation of a Household Survey in Hamra, Beirut, can be found here.