Maija Sequeira
PhD Researcher, University of Helsinki

Scholarly Work
Articles and Presentations


Generating Anthropological Insights About Power from Fieldwork Amongst Children
December 2, 2021
Invited speaker to "Conversations in Anthropology" series co-organised by the Institute for Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University and the Society for Anthropological Sciences-EuroAsia. Video available here.
Follow the Leader: A study of children’s understanding of social hierarchies in Finland
June 3, 2021
Panel presentation at the European Network for Psychological Anthropology conference, 1-3 June 2021.

Fairness, partner choice, and punishment: An ethnographic study of cooperative behavior among children in Helsinki, Finland
2023
The first article published from my PhD; available online on Ethos. Available here: https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12385

Personal Profile
I am a PhD researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki.
My research combines methods from anthropology and developmental psychology to explore and compare how children in Santa Marta, Colombia, and Helsinki, Finland, learn, conceptualise and enact social hierarchies in their everyday lives. I take an evolutionary approach in my research and am interested in exploring how concepts such as dominance and prestige, cooperation, punishment and shame unfold in real life.
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I am currently a doctoral employee (05.2021 - 04.2025) and was previously funded by the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF; 5.2020 - 4.2021).
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Before coming to Helsinki I was awarded an MSc in Demography and Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2013), and a BA in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford (2011).
Before starting my PhD in Anthropology I carried out a research year in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, UK and worked in English and bilingual education in Colombia. I currently live in Helsinki with my husband and dog.
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