Biography
Dr. Tanja Hoffmann is a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist whose interdisciplinary research engages very broadly with the question: How do Indigenous and place-based peoples use the past to inform the present and guide the future? Her most recent collaborative research project called “Katzie Customary Law: Inward Gathering and Outward Sharing”, seeks to understand how Indigenous law can be used to affect meaningful change in Canadian resource management policy. In the UK Dr. Hoffmann’s work centres on understanding how place-based knowledge held by farming families can be used to better capture and understand the cumulative impacts of large-scale linear development (e.g. road and rail) projects. Dr. Hoffmann is an affiliated lecturer with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and an affiliated member of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. She is also a tutor with University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education. Her teaching is highly collaborative and she uses discussion and presentation of real-world case studies to facilitate understanding of the often complex issues that confront researchers, especially those engaged in community-based research. Dr. Hoffmann has over 20 years experience teaching adult students. She has found that adult students have lived experiences that provide important, often nuanced insight into the topics presented in class.