Researchers´ Profiles - Ebba Olofsson

Ebba Olofsson has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University (Sweden). Her dissertation In Search of a Fulfilling Identity in a Modern World: Narratives of Indigenous Identities in Sweden and Canada was published at the same university (2004). The results are based on a long-term fieldwork and the gathering of narratives both among the Saami in Sweden and among Aboriginal groups in Montreal (Native Friendship Centre and Native Women Shelter).

She is living in Montreal since 1998 (the beginning of the Canadian fieldwork). Between 2005 and 2008 she worked with Dr. Laurence Kirmayer, M.D. as a postdoctoral fellow in Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. She was based at the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit at the Jewish General Hospital. The postdoctoral research explores the narratives of Inuit men and women from northern Quebec who underwent medical treatment for tuberculosis in hospitals in Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba. The focus is on those individuals who were sent south for treatment in their youth or childhood and who are today in their 60’s and 70’s. The study involves life history interviews with persons living in Montreal and persons living in different communities in Nunavik (northern Quebec, Canada).

The results of the research are published in Inuit Studies Journal at Laval University. The title of the article is "Negotiating Identities: Inuit Tuberculosis Evacuees in 1940s-1950s." “She also has an article about this research published in an Inuit magazine Makivik Magazine. Ebba Olofsson is teaching Anthropology at Champlain College in Montreal, and at McGill University in Montreal, as well as at the Department of International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), at Malmö högskola (Malmo University).