Dr. Anna-Maria Walter

Anna-Maria Walter currently holds a postdoctoral position at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, where she works on various ways of engaging with and understanding the cryosphere. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from LMU in 2018. Her work focused on the anthropology of emotions, gender relations, and mobile phones in the high mountains of Gilgit, northern Pakistan. Her monograph Intimate Connections: Love and Marriage in Pakistan’s High Mountains was published by Rutgers in 2022. Walter has written on the anthropology of emotions, conceptions of the self through social media use, digital anthropology, and field methodologies. As a postdoctoral researcher for the University of Oulu, she has worked on socio-ecological dimensions of Alpine ski touring and perceptions of mountain landscapes over time.

Project at CAS

At CAS, Anna-Maria Walter works on her project “Triangulating Glacier Expertise: Fostering Exchange Between the Karakoram-Himalayas and the Alps”. The UN has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation. To live up to the urgent goal of learning more about efforts to engineer the cryosphere and opening avenues for transnational exchange, Walter’s project seeks to set scientific approaches in conversation with the intimate knowledge local populations have of the inner workings of glaciers. Adding cosmological, sensory but also practical dimensions to the technoscientific approaches of glaciologists seeks to widen the epistemological base of cryosphere sciences. By initiating avenues for exchange and collaboration between research sites in the Karakoram-Himalayas and the Alps, a triangulation of glacier expertise aims to overcome typical modes of knowledge extraction and to transcend postcolonial hierarchies.