Dr Alberto Corsín Jiménez

I read Economics in Madrid and worked for a couple of years as an economic analyst there and in London before switching to anthropology. In 1996 I completed an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and moved to Oxford to do my D.Phil. (2001), which involved two years of fieldwork (1997-1999) in Antofagasta, a mining town in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The ethnography that ensued explored the relationship between the imagination of the desert and the city's social life. The theoretical thrust of that work engaged with questions of (urban) space and led to a critique of anthropological analyses of 'place' and 'landscape', as well as an analysis of the place of these ideas in the workings of political economy.

Between 2001 and 2003, I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and did another 6 months of fieldwork in Chile, this time between Antofagasta and Maria Elena (a desert mining community). I joined the Department of Social Anthropology in 2003.

From 2004-2007 I was Media and Public Relations Officer for the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (www.theasa.org).

Between 2004-2006 I was Book Reviews Editor for Critique of Anthropology.

In Manchester I am also a member of the Executive Committee of the Cultural Theory Institute.

My areas of interest are the production and management of knowledge in organisational contexts. I am especially interested in the connections and articulations between research, scholarship and knowledge-management in contemporary liberal institutions, including universities.

Today arguments about the relevance and importance of certain modes of organising knowledge are often expressed in terms of 'public value', 'social responsibility', 'distributive justice', even 'political ethics'. So I have found myself writing about these things too.

A larger interest is in the anthropology of theory (and anthropological theory in particular): I am interested in the conceptual objects (e.g. relations, perspectives, proportions) through which we imagine and conceptualise theory as an analytical field.

My research is currently divided into the following areas:

I am finishing writing a book that tries to theorise a political anthropology for the knowledge economy and society. My interest here is to understand the modes of organising that allow speaking of knowledge as an object of ‘public’ concern.

I am also in the process of writing-up to recent fieldwork projects:

- Research among historians of science and philologists at Spain's National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Madrid. My interest here is describing the current political economy of epistemology in the social sciences and humanities.

- An ethnography of management and architectural design consultants in Buenos Aires. I spent a year working with people involved in the conceptual and architectural design of a new building for one of the world's largest oil companies. My work looks at the (literally( laying out of knowledge as a building material in its own right.

SOAN30101 After utopia: anthropology of the knowledge society and economy

SOAN20842 The Ethnographer’s Craft

I will be happy to supervise students with an interest in the political economy of science, education and knowledge; anthropological theory; anthropology of organisations; and the anthropology of ethical forms.

Publications Database

 

2008. ‘Madrid ‘en construcción’: polis y apocalipsis en una sociedad hipotecaria’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3.

2008. ‘Economies of repetition: anthropology on the cultures of innovation.’ Madrid+d, No. 46, pp. 21-26.

2008. ‘Relations and disproportions: the labor of scholarship in the knowledge economy.’ American Ethnologist, Vol 35, No. 2.

2008. ‘Cooperación y procomún: relaciones antropológicas.’ Archipiélago: cuadernos de crítica de la cultura, No. 77-78.

2008. (Ed.) Culture and well-being: anthropological approaches to freedom and political ethics. London: Pluto Press

2007. (Ed.) The anthropology of organisations: a reader. Aldershot: Ashgate/Dartmouth

2007. (With Rane Willerslev.) ‘‘An anthropological concept of the concept’: reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghir.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 527-544.

2007. ‘Pampa e historia: minería del salitre en el Desierto de Atacama en el siglo XX.’ Hombre y Desierto, Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile

2007. 'Industry going public: rethinking knowledge and administration.' In Anthropology and Science, eds. Peter Wade, Jeanette Edwards and Penny Harvey. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers

2005. 'After trust.' Cambridge Anthropology , Special edition on ‘Creativity or temporality?’, eds. Eric Hirsch and Sharon Macdonald, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 64-78

2005. (With Ian Harper.) 'Towards an interactive professional ethics.' Anthropology Today, Vol. 21, No. 6, pp. 10-12

2005. ‘Landscaping history: nitrate mining in the Atacama desert in the 20th century’. In Mike Smith and Paul Hesse (eds.), 23 South: archaeology and environmental history of the southern deserts . National Museum of Australia

2005. 'Changing scales and the scales of change: ethnography and political economy in Antofagasta, Chile.' Critique of Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 155-174

2004. 'The form of the relation: anthropology's enchantment with the algebraic imagination'. Manchester: unpublished manuscript.

2004. 'Teaching the field: the order, ordering, and scale of knowledge.' In David Mills and Mark Harris (eds.), Teaching rites and wrongs: universities and the making of anthropologists. C-SAP Monograph Series No. 2. Birmingham: C-SAP, The Higher Academy Network.

2003. ‘On Space as a Capacity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 137-153

2003. ‘Working out personhood: notes on labour and its anthropology’, Anthropology Today, Volume 5, no. 5, pp. 14-17

I will be happy to attend media enquiries on questions to do with the political and economic organisation of science; the anthropology of organisations; and the anthropology of ethics.