Social and Cultural Anthropologist awarded ERC Starting Grant
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an ERC Starting Grant to Dr Victoria Kumala Sakti. With the funding of around 2 million euros the scientist from the University of Münster’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology will pursue the research project entitled “Improvising Later Life in the City: A Multi-sited Ethnography of Ageing in Rapidly Urbanising Contexts” (“LIV-AGE” for short) over the next five years. Starting in spring 2027, the social and cultural anthropologist will investigate how rapid urbanisation and an ageing population affect life in old age in different social and cultural contexts.
LIV-AGE explores how older adults navigate changing urban environments, secure care and livelihoods, maintain mobility, and create belonging amid informality, inequality, and precariousness. The project situates these experiences within the longer histories of violence, displacement, and inequality that have shaped cities in the Global South and continue to influence everyday life.
With the support Victoria Sakti will establish a research group to conduct comparative, multi-sited ethnographic research across Indonesia, Colombia, and Zimbabwe, spanning megacities to smaller urban centres. „Münster will serve as a learning hub, bringing insights from the three research sites into conversation and connecting perspectives across the Global South and North“, she explains. Working collaboratively with older adults, communities, and professionals in urban design and policy, the project combines ethnography with interviews, sensorial and multimodal methods, archival and historical research.
LIV-AGE aims to develop new ways of understanding ageing at the intersection of urbanisation, inequality, and Southern urbanisms. It will examine how older adults experience changing cities, and also how ideas of “age-friendly” urban development are translated, contested, and reimagined from the ground up in different contexts. By bringing comparative, historically grounded insights from several countries into dialogue, the project seeks to illuminate diverse futures of later life in a rapidly changing world.
Victoria Sakti is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching explore transnational mobilities, ageing, displacement, gender, political violence, and social transformation, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia—particularly Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork, her work foregrounds perspectives, practices, and experiences emerging from the Global South.
Her research centres on the experiences of ageing in contexts of forced migration and protracted displacement, the dynamics of care, everyday life, and inequality within urban environments, and the emotional and social dimensions of memory and violence, including processes of social repair. Her approach combines ethnographic, multi-modal, and creative methods to examine how individuals and communities navigate shifting social and political landscapes. Before joining the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster in Spring 2025, she has held positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotions” at Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg.
ERC Grants
The ERC Starting Grants funding line supports young researchers who wish to establish their own independent research group. Other ERC funding lines include the Consolidator Grant and the Advanced Grant.