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:
- corporation culture in South Korea (Michael Prentice);
- domestic moral economy and nation-building in the Pacific (Karen Sykes);
- the politics of racism and anti-racism (Peter Wade);
- social inequality, nation and identity in the UK (Katie Smith, Gillian Evans, Jeanette Edwards);
- infrastructures and material politics (Penny Harvey);
- development NGOs, humanitarianism and disaster management (Chika Watanabe);
- religious change, witchcraft and participatory development practices (Maia Green);
- post-socialist economic transformation (Stef Jansen);
- modernity, kinship and social change in the Middle East (Michelle Obeid);
- changing regimes of labour (Madeleine Reeves, Penny Harvey, Karen Sykes, Katie Smith);
- changing urban political economy and home-making in Latin America (Angela Torresan);
- libertarians, freedom and equality in the UK (Soumhya Venkatesan).
States, Cities, Borders and Mobilities
This work focuses on:
- post-socialist state projects, nationalism, and displacement (Stef Jansen);
- state projects in the Andes (Penny Harvey);
- the state, mobilities, affect and border-making in Central Asia and Russia (Madeleine Reeves);
- indigenous mapping of urban space in Chile (Olivia Casagrande);
- gentrification in Latin American cities (Angela Torresan);
- collapse and urban failure in Africa and the UK (Constance Smith);
- mega sporting events and the politics of legacy (Gillian Evans);
- Palestinian migrants in London (Michelle Obeid).
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)
- history, theory and practice of ethnographic documentary film-making (Paul Henley)
- filmmaking for fieldwork (Andy Lawrence)
- anthropology of architecture, materials and urban landscape in Africa and the UK (Constance Smith)
Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine
This work focuses on:
- climate change, ways of knowing and community resilience in the Arctic and Siberia (Olga Ulturagesheva);
- nuclear imaginaries (Penny Harvey; Petra Kalshoven);
- military environments, public health and art-science collaborations (Rupert Cox);
- assisted reproduction, kinship and technologies of the body (Jeanette Edwards);
- genomics, race, nation and public health (Peter Wade);
- HIV/AIDS, death, religion and masculinity (Tony Simpson);
- stillbirth prevention in Africa (Maia Green);
- the art of life and death (Andrew Irving);
- visual media, youth resilience and deafness (Andrew Irving; Lorenzo Ferrarini).