Jenny holds a PhD in ethnology and works as a lecturer and researcher.
Jenny conducts research that is rooted in ethnological theory and method. Her research revolves around issues that concern people and power, e.g., in migration studies, studies of colonial history or studies of places. She is also engaged in questions concerning creative ethnographic writing.
During 2022-2024, Jenny is PI of the project "Settlement and Dispossession Entangled: Swedish Migration to Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia" funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This project focuses on Swedish migration to Latin America in the early 1900s. The main purpose is to discuss how migration, settlement and dispossession became entangled in everyday life of settler societies
During 2020-2022, Jenny was PI of the Formas-funded project "Mobilized villages: local community agency during the Swedish wildfires in 2018 and the process of re-orientation towards the future". The purpose of this project was to study how local communities particularly affected by the wildfires in 2018 mobilized local resources to cope with the crisis, how local residents narrate the crisis and its aftermath, and what the crisis led to in terms of strategies and awareness of sustainable development in the future.
During 2018-2020, Jenny led the postdoctoral research project, "Migration and Settler Colonialism: The Makings of Heritage among Swedish Descendants in Argentina". The purpose of the project was to study how Swedish-Argentine identity and cultural heritage was created through a discursive cultural process in contemporary Argentina understood as a society characterized by settler colonialism.
In 2017, Jenny defended her thesis, "The Promises of the Free World: Postsocialist Experience in Argentina and the Making of Migrants, Race, and Coloniality". This thesis investigates the narrated experiences of a number of individuals that migrated to Argentina from Russia and Ukraine in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The over-arching aim was to study the ways in which these migrants navigated the social reality in Argentina, with regards to available physical, material, and socioeconomic positions as well as with regards to their narrated self-understandings and identifications.
Jenny teaches on courses related to cultural theory and ethnology. Currently she teaches at courses about rurality and urban norms, cultural perspectives on the Anthropocene and ethnographic writing.