Current research

Our research takes interdisciplinary approaches to understand inequality and effecting change.

Members of academic staff work in many areas of the world, including the United Kingdom, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, Russia, Siberia and Central Asia, Japan, India, and the United States. 

Our research covers a diverse set of topics including poverty, inequality, social class, race and racism; gender, kinship and the body; infrastructures, materiality and state projects; borders, mobilities and migration; labour, value and moral economy; development and humanitarianism; biotechnology and science; visual and sensory anthropology; expertise and learning; and medical anthropology, illness and death. 

Themes

We organise this diversity into four broad and overlapping themes:

Critical, Political and Moral Economy

This work focuses on:

States, Cities, Borders and Mobilities

This work focuses on:

Visual, Sensory and Material Anthropology

This area of research includes the following topics:

  • the political ecology of noise, sound art practice and the anthropology of sound (Rupert Cox);
  • media practices, imaginative lifeworlds and social inclusion (Andrew Irving);
  • ecological perception, learning expertise and audio-visual technologies (Lorenzo Ferrarini);
  • ethnographic film and the development of anthropological knowledge (Angela Torresan);
  • the agency of objects, ritual knowledge and social change (Soumhya Venkatesan);
  • filmmaking for fieldwork (Andy Lawrence);
  • anthropology of architecture, materials and urban landscape in Africa and the UK (Constance Smith);
  • material culture and power in settler colonial societies (Sonja Dobroski);
  • subjectivity, performance, and moral experience how selves are made (Meghan Rose Donnelly);
  • documentary filmmaking, animation, theatre and storytelling as collaborative methods of research (Alexandra D'Onofrio).

Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine

This work focuses on:

Projects