Soheila Shourbaji

I am a social 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 knots it creates in the social world of the crofters. I conducted 12 months of extensive field research with crofters in a North Argyll village. This fieldwork has taken me to crofters' households, parcels, and common grazing land, and well beyond with them as they traded their livestock at auction marts, engaged in local and national politics, and tended their cattle and sheep that shape the rural geography both in their presence and absence.

My work engages economic and legal anthropology traditions and centres around the pursuit of ethnographic theory of value, temporality, and sociality in the tension between property and possession. Crofting has allowed me to ask questions about the formation of property and teleologies of enclosure through the puzzle of how the prospect of succession configures land use and distribution.

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, 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 Highlands of Scotland.

I conducted ethnographic research with a publisher in Lebanon for my MA in Anthropology (2022) at the American University of Beirut and remain interested in the social reproduction of cultural production in the Arab World. In my move to Scotland, I am committed to work that challenges the normative flow of anthropological research.

Academic Presentations

• Invited Talk - The Binds of Crofting and Bounds of Imagining: How Crofters Constitute Crofts for the Anthropology Society in Lebanon, April 2025.
• Panel presentation - The House and the Other House: Kinship and Kin-work in Publishing at the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) conference in the Czech Republic, June 2023.
• Workshop - Currencies for the Commons: A Case for Inflation as Ethnographic Lens with Natalie Wood at the EASA Applied Anthropology conference in Italy, October 2025.
• Poster Presentation - Crofting Knots: Tenure, Parcelisation, Succession for Scotland's Land Reform Futures International Symposium at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, November 2025.

Teaching

I have been the teaching assistant on some anthropology modules:

• Introduction to Ethnographic Reading
• Anthropology of Kinship, Gender, and Sex

Academic Service

• Co-convener of the Land Reading and Research Group with María José Jordán
• Co-organised the Anthropology PGR showcase in May 2023 and May 2025
• Membership Committee member at the Syrian Academics and Researchers Network in the UK (SARN) 

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.