Margarita Lipatova is from Moscow, Russia. She completed her B.A. at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow. Her B.A. degree was focused on political and economic development in Southeast Asia. Margarita was always attracted to Oriental studies. The choice for Germany and the University of Heidelberg was primarily motivated by the offered MAHASSA program. South Asian Studies is a rare field of study and so the university offers a quite unique and challenging program with almost no comparable programs anywhere in the world. MAHASSA seems to be the best choice for her to continue studying what she finds intriguing but with a different focus. The focus on Medical Anthropology will, as she hopes, help her to fulfill her desire to work in a humanitarian organization.
Update: After graduation from MAHASSA I have worked outside academia in the humanitarian sector and in the field of social entrepreneurship. Since 2017 I have been working on a PhD project that deals with European border regime and its manifestation in the form of refugee camps. I am looking on the spaces of camps as political sites, where negotiation and resistance occur. The site of the research is Greece , a state portrayed as one of the key spectacles and symbols of what has come to be known as the “European refugee crisis”. The project is a part of larger project of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology "Technicisation of exclusionary practices in the context of migration" and is supervised by Karin Polit and Richard Rottenburg.
