Irna Hofman is Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She is a rural sociologist, specialising in social and agrarian change in Central Asia. Irna has undertaken extensive periods of fieldwork in rural Central Asia, centred on agrarian change and everyday politics of Global China. She obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University (Humanities, in 2019). Between 2019 and 2022 she was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, in the ERC-funded “China, Law and Development” project. She is still affiliated with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment.  

As lecturer, Irna is involved in various courses and programmes. At CADS, she teaches the MSc courses Research Design and Thesis Seminar for the specialisation Global Ethnography, and also supervises MSc thesis students. Irna co-teaches the BA courses Economy and Ecology, and Anthropological Research in Practice and is involved in Diversity and Development, and Ethics in Contemporary Ethnographic Research. In addition, she is involved in Leiden University’s BA programme Urban Studies and the BSc programme Science for Sustainable Societies.

Research

Irna her research interests are broad and sit at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. Her current research agenda centres on the rural everyday of geopolitics, with a focus on shifting geographies of production, land politics, and rural labour. She is currently engaged with three research projects: an individual research project focused on Chinese agri-tech in Central and South Asia, funded by the Delta on the Move foundation; as Principal Investigator, Irna leads a UKRI Network Plus funded project centred on the Geopolitics of Rural Infrastructure in Central Asia; and, at Leiden University, she coordinates the seed-funded project “Beyond Seaweed as Superfood: Knowledge, Innovation, and Alternative Value Chains in the Blue Economy.”  

Irna is affiliated with the Second Cold War Observatory initiative, a collective of scholars committed to developing historically and contextually situated understandings of how great power rivalry influences and shapes societies, economies, and ecologies worldwide; and, Mapping Global China, which aims to foster dialogue, share knowledge, and deepen understanding of China's global impact across disciplines and regions project.  

Publications