Dr Thomas Hilder has recently been awarded a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London for his thesis Sámi Soundscapes: Music and the Politics of Indigeneity in Arctic Europe, under the supervision of Prof. Tina K. Ramnarine. His doctoral research investigates the interplay of contemporary popular musical performance of the Sámi of Northern Scandinavia, and the politics of indigeneity, and is based on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research in Norway. Drawing on debates within the fields of anthropology, geography, political theory and postcolonial studies, his thesis focuses in particular on music’s role in reviving Sámi identity, language and culture, commenting on processes of nation building, cultural dispossession and environmental devastation, and working towards building a transnational Sámi community and cosmopolitan global indigenous network. Thomas is now conducting research on music in queer activism in Berlin as a guest researcher at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.

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