Biography

Christina Woolner is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, working on a project titled “The poetry of politics and politics of poetry: transforming political subjectivities in Somaliland.”

Dr. Woolner recently completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where she wrote a dissertation titled The Labour of Love Songs: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with poets, musicians, singers, music-lovers and love-suffering audiences in Hargeysa, her dissertation explores how love songs distill, perform and open space for intimacy – in the way they are produced, circulated, debated, listened to, performed, and put to work in public and private settings. Her dissertation paid particular attention to the way that different ideas about the voice, and different practices of voicing intersect to enable intimate relationships and subjectivities.

Dr. Woolner’s current research project takes her interest in voice and voicing into the realm of Somali political orature. In what is often called a “nation of poets”, she will be focusing on a recent poetry debate chain known as “miimley” – a series of poems that criticized and defended Somaliland’s government – to explore gendered and generational shifts in ideas of “voice”, subjectivity and political belonging.

Dr. Woolner’s current research builds on a long-held interest in the role of storytelling and voice in war and peacebuilding processes. She has worked as an instructor/lecturer in peace and conflict studies at universities in Canada and Somaliland, as well as a researcher at Project Ploughshares, a Canadian NGO that monitors armed conflict and the armaments industry. She holds a BA in Global Studies and Religion & Culture (Wilfrid Laurier University), an MA in International Peace Studies (University of Notre Dame), and an MPhil in Social Anthropology (Cambridge).