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, the Arctic, 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; climate change; visual and sensory anthropology; expertise and learning; and medical anthropology, illness and death.
Themes
We organise this diversity into four broad and overlapping themes:
This work focuses on:
- 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);
- infrastructures and material politics (Penny Harvey);
- development NGOs, humanitarianism and disaster management (Chika Watanabe);
- religious change, witchcraft and participatory development practices (Maia Green) ritual and political innovation in colonial and postcolonial ruptures (Chloe Nahum-Claudel);
- modernity, kinship and social change in the Middle East (Michelle Obeid);
- changing regimes of labour (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);
- settler colonial theory and Native American studies (Sonja Dobroski);
- agribusiness and hydropower frontiers (Chloe Nahum-Claudel);
- moral utopias and historically-situated utopian desire (Judy Thorne);
- moral articulations associated with capitalist change; unemployed and underemployed youth and their struggles for adulthood and moral reputation (Peter Lockwood).
This work focuses on:
- state projects in the Andes (Penny Harvey);
- 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);
- migration, forced displacement, uncertainty, political subjectivity and advocacy (Sebastien Bachelet);
- human rights, religious activism, and the state’s relations with religious practice (Méadhbh McIvor);
- community arts as collaborative methods of research on migration (Alexandra D'Onofrio).
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).
This work focuses on:
- climate change, ways of knowing and community resilience in the Arctic and Siberia (Olga Ulturgasheva);
- nuclear imaginaries, nuclear waste (Penny Harvey, Petra Kalshoven, Basak Sarac-Lesavre);
- military environments, public health and art-science collaborations (Rupert Cox);
- 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);
- digital and data practices, digital visual communication, mobile media and mobile livelihoods and intergenerational relations, work and gender (Jolynna Sinanan);
- forensic psychiatry, mentally unwell offenders (Piyush Pushkar).