Jennifer Mack is an anthropologist and historian of the built environment. She is Docent and Associate Professor at KTH and an elected member of the Young Academy of Sweden. Mack is also a board member of RIFO (Sällskapet riksdagsledamöter och forskare) and of SANT (the Swedish Anthropological Association).

Mack’s forthcoming book, Modernism’s Hereafters: Reports from the Welfare City, will be published by University of Texas Press in 2027 and is based on her research during her time in the Pro Futura program. In it, she analyzes Danish and Swedish modernist neighborhoods, framed as “welfare cities,” from their planning in the postwar period into the present. Mack reveals how the stigmatization and racialization of welfare cities over many decades have led them to be declared “exposed” (utsatt/udsat) areas, a label now used to justify demolitions and privatizations while also suggesting environmental registers of contamination. Mack questions these “hereafters:” representations that have crystallized into “truths” and that, in turn, precipitate politically driven change in the name of the public good.

Mack’s earlier monograph, The Construction of Equality (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the Margaret Mead Award from SfAA/AAA in 2018. In this diasporic architectural history, she traces how Syriac Orthodox Christians transformed a Swedish city over five decades. Mack was co-editor, with Michael Herzfeld, of Life Among Urban Planners (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and co-editor, with Sten Gromark and Roemer van Toorn, of Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2019). She is currently co-editing, with Pablo Miranda Carranza, The Combinatorial Imperative (TU Delft, forthcoming 2026) and, with Ellen Braae, Mattias Qviström, and Ranja Hautamäki, Nordic Landscapes for the “Good Life” (Aarhus University Press, forthcoming 2027). Mack is an associate editor of Housing, Theory and Society and a member of the editorial boards of Human Organization and Thresholds. She has published widely in journals like American Ethnologist, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, the Journal of Modern European History, Landscape Research, and Public Culture, and in numerous edited volumes.

Mack is currently conducting pilot research on the material and social histories of wetland drainage in the UK. Working in the nexus between history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Mack is primarily interested in how equality and ecology meet the built environment.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.

SCAS Talks Podcast - Episode 55: Modernist Suburbs and Their Missing Stories External link, opens in new window.