Vital Signs 2: Keynote speakers - Nigel Rapport
Biography
Professor Nigel Rapport (MA (Cambridge), PhD (Manchester)) holds the Chair of Anthropological and Philisophical Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. He is director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies (CCS).
Between 2004 and 2007 he held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordian University of Montreal. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (2002-6), at Melbourne University (2004), and at Copenhagen University (2000). Before St. Andrews he held tenured positions at Manchester University (1989 - 1993) and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1988-1989).
Nigel Rapport has undertaken four pieces of extended field research. These were conducted largely by participant-observation: among farmers and tourists in a rural English village (1980-1); among transient population of a Newfoundland city and suburb (1984-5); among new immigrants in an Israeli development-town (1988-9); and among health-care professionals and patients in a Scottish hospital (2000-1).
His research interests include: social theory, phenomenology, identity, individuality, consciousness, literary anthropology, narrative, symbolic interactionism, community studies, conversation analysis, representation, aestetics, postmodernism, globalization, violence, and anthropology as a moral pursuit.
Nigel Rapport is author of:
- Talking Violence. An anthropological interpretation of conversation in the city (ISER Press, Memorial University 1987)
- Diverse World - Views in an English Village (Edinburgh University Press 1993)
- 'The Prose and the Passion' Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M. Forster (Manchester University Press 1994)
- Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literacy and Liberal Anthropology (Routledge 1997)
- Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts [with Joanna Overing] (Routledge 2000, second edition 2007, Chinese translation 2007)
- The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity [with Vered Amit] (Pluto 2002)
- 'I am Dynamite': An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge 2003)
- Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (Carolina Academic 2008)
- World and Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Project of Anthropology (Berghahn, forthcoming)
And he is editor of:
- Questions and Consciousness [with A.P.Cohen] (Routledge 1995)
- Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of 'Home' in a World of Movement [with A. Dawson} (Berg 1998)
- British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain (Berg 2002)
- 2000 Years: Faith, Identity and Society in the Common Era [with P. Gifford, D. Archard and T.Hart] (Routledge 2002)
- Democracy, Science and The Open Society: A European Legacy? (Special Issue of Anthropological Journal on European Cultures - Volume 13) (Lit Verlag 2005)
- Senses of Spacial Equilibrium and the Journey: Confounded, Discomposed and Recomposed (Special Issue of Journeys, volume 9 (2)) [with A. Irving and A. Sen] (Oxford and New York: Berghahn 2008)
- Human Nature/ Human Identity: Anthropological Revisionings (Special Issue of Anthropologica volume 51 (1)) [with S. Aprahamian and K. Neves] (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2009)
- Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification (Berghahn 2010)
- 2010 Reveries of Home: Nostalgia, Authenticity and the Performance of Place [with S. Williksen] (Cambridge Scholars 2010)
Nigel Rapport has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
See Nigel's web page for more details of his research and publications [opens in a new window]
Nigel will be giving a plenary session on Wednesday 8 September entitled 'Voice, History and Vertigo: Doing justice to dead voices through imaginative converstion'
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