Irna Hofman is Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She is a rural development 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 BA courses and programmes, including in the BA CADS, the BA Urban Studies, and the BSc Science for Sustainable Societies. She also supervises MSc thesis students.

Research

Irna her research interests are broad and sit at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and political sociology. She currently completes various publications based on her post-doctoral research project at the University of Oxford, and undertakes an individual research project focused on Chinese agri-tech in Central Asia, funded by the Delta on the Move foundation.

Her research agenda for the coming years centres on the rural everyday of geopolitics, with a focus on China's growing assertiveness in the global agrifood regime, shifting geographies of production, and rural labour. She 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.