September 2009 – December 2009
Professor Alexander F. Robertson, Edinburgh University
Alexander Robertson is an Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. Before joining the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985 as Professor of Anthropology, Sandy taught Development Sociology and directed the African Studies Centre at Cambridge University. His writing on the broader political, economic and historical implications of family life draws on extensive research in Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. His recent books include Beyond the Family: The Social Organization of Human Reproduction; Greed: Gut Feelings, Growth, and History; and a study of the mainly older women who collect Life Like Dolls. Over the last decade he has spent several months each year in Spain, and is currently completing a book on The Regeneration of a Catalan Community.
Dr Gillian Tett, Anthropologist and Assistant Editor, Financial Times.
Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the Financial Times and oversees the global coverage of the financial markets. In March 2009 she was named Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. In June 2009 her book book Fools Gold won Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spear’s Book Awards. Gillian Tett has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, based on research conducted in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Tett was Japan correspondent for the FT during the country’s financial collapse, and wrote a book about it, Saving the Sun. See also On the Money.
Prof. Stephen Gudeman, University of Minnesota.
Stephen Gudeman received his PhD from Cambridge in social anthropology and has carried out research in Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, and Cuba. A professor at the University of Minnesota, he is currently at the Max Planck Institute (Halle) where he is co-directing (with Chris Hann) a comparative, three-year project on Economy and Ritual in Eurasia. The project members are undertaking post-PhD research in six Eastern European and Asian countries. Gudeman has taught at several universities and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala). He is the author of six books and numerous articles including Economy’s Tension (2008) and The Anthropology of Economy (2001), as well as recent articles in Anthropology Today, Watching Wall Street (2008) and Hoarding Wealth: When Vice Becomes Virtue (2009).
Dr. Massimiliano Mollona, Goldsmiths, University of London
Massimiliano Mollona teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London. He has worked extensively on the anthropology of class, labour and industry and done fieldwork on processes of privatisation in steel towns in Brazil and UK. He also teaches visual anthropology and involved in several participatory film projects in Brazil and UK. He is one of the editors of Critique of Anthropology and Dialectical Anthropology and member of the ASA short film committee.
Prof Karen Z. Ho, University of Minnesota
Karen Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology department of the University of Minnesota. She employed the perspectives and research techniques of anthropology to study Wall Street. Viewing Wall Street investment bankers as members of an ethnographic group, she could ask, what was their culture, what were their values, how did they make sense of and negotiate their practices which seemed to be heightening socio-economic inequalities and worker trauma? One of the innovations of Professor Ho’s work was to ask, what do we find when we apply anthropological concepts to the study of a local site (Wall Street) that is imagined as a global place? Her published work include: Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Bank (2005) and Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (forthcoming). Professor Ho’s new project focuses on the subject of microfinance, the providing of small loans by a variety of bank and non-bank organizations with the stated aim of improving the circumstances of disadvantaged groups, both in the United States and in the developing world. Her research is paving the way for other anthropologists to apply ethnographic techniques to exploring such dynamic issues in the modern world. Also read this.
Prof. Keith Hart, Goldsmiths, University of London
Keith Hart is an anthropologist who lives in Paris, where he has recently entered a number of collaborations with French intellectuals. He is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professor in both the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban and the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Pretoria. He started out studying classical languages and literature and went on to explore Atlantic society from the point of view of Africans in West Africa, North America, the Caribbean, Britain, France and South Africa. Now he contemplates the Indian Ocean from a beach flat in Durban, South Africa. Keith has taught in ten universities on both sides of the Atlantic, for the longest time in Cambridge, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. He has worked as a consultant, journalist, publisher and gambler. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology, especially about money. His life is now defined by the poles of solitary writing and world travel. In this he is sustained by his family and by the virtual social network in his laptop.
Prof. Robert Jessop, Lancaster University
Robert Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre. He has a long-standing interest in the nature of capitalism and the modern state, has written extensively on post-war British and European economics and politics, has been researching the contradictions of the knowledge-based economy for some years, and is now examining the contradictions of finance-led accumulation on a global scale. Relevant publications include: ‘From hegemony to crisis? The continuing ecological dominance of neo-liberalism’, in K. Birch, V. Mykhnenko, and K. Trebeck, eds, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: the Collapse of an Economic Order, London: Zed Books (in press).
‘The knowledge economy as a state project’, in M.Boss, ed., The Nation-State in Transformation: Economic Globalisation, Institutional Mediation, and Socio-Political Values, Copenhagen: Copenhagen University Press, 2009.
‘The spatiotemporal dynamics of capital and its globalization and their impact on state power and democracy’, in H. Rosa and W.E. Scheuerman, eds, High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009, 135-158.
‘A cultural political economy of competitiveness and its implications for higher education’, in B. Jessop, N. Fairclough, and R. Wodak, eds, Education and the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007, 11-39.
‘Critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy’, Critical Discourse Studies, 1 (2), 2004, 159-174.
The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
‘The crisis of the national spatio-temporal fix and the ecological dominance of globalizing capitalism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, 24 (2), 2000, 323-360.
June 2008 – July 2008
Exotic film:
Daniel Rodriguez
Marcus Course
Andre Singer
April 2008 – June 2008
Immigration:
Dr. Katy Gardner Anthropology, Sussex
Katy Gardner‘s doctoral research examined the cultural and social changes associated with international migration and globalisation in Bangladesh, resulting in her monograph Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh (OUP 1995). She is also interested in the relationship between anthropology and development, especially in recent critiques of development as ‘discourse’. Her monograph, Age, Narrative and Migration: The Life Course and Life Histories amongst Bengali Elders in London (Berg, 2002) analyses the elders’ narratives of migration, ageing and illness in the UK, and suggests that transnational migration can be usefully understood as a gendered and embodied experience. As part of her on-going interest in transnational migration, Katy has published an edited collection on Transnational Migration and Household Ritual (Special Edition of Global Networks, 2002; with Ralph Grillo). She has also edited a collection that draws together current work on migration within South Asia (Migration and Modernity in South Asia, Sage, 2004; with Filippo Osella). More recently, she researched the relationship between internal seasonal migration and overseas migration in a project funded by the Development Research Centre in Migration, Poverty and Globalisation at Sussex. In 2006 she received funding from the AHRC, as part of its Migration, Identities and Diaspora Programme, for research on transnational South Asian children.
Barrister Kathryn Cronin, Garden Court Chambers
Barrister Kathryn Cronin specialises in immigration, asylum, nationality and family law and has considerable experience in cross-over areas where family or childcare cases involve associated issues on immigration status, or in immigration cases where there are family and childcare law and practice considerations. She regularly provides advice to parties, local authorities or guardians ad litem concerning the steps to be taken to resolve immigration problems whether for parents or for minors. She has been the representative for many persons trafficked for sexual or domestic labour purposes.
Prof. Nina Glick Schiller Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC), Manchester University
Prof. Nina Glick Schiller has developed a comparative and historical perspective on migration, transnational processes and social relations and diasporic in more than 60 articles and three books. Her concern has been to explore differences of power within transnational social fields in relationship to the constitution of gender, race, class, status, poverty, the second generation, citizenship, and national identity. To foster publication from this perspective in 1992 she founded the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and edited it for eight years. Her research has been conducted in Haiti, the United States, and Germany and she has worked with immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented workers from all regions of the globe. Her two current book projects, develop migration theory by examining the relationship between the migrant and the city. The first book, Locating Migration: The Migrant and the Scale, co-edited with Ayse Caglar, examines the relationship between the scalar positioning of cities and the pathways of migrant The second book, Pathways: Placing Migration Theory, argues that the entire debate about immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and citizenship has very little to do with how migrants actually live their lives. This book builds a grounded but globally contextualized theory of migration by drawing on her current ethnography in two small-scale cities, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA and Halle/Saale in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany.
Prof. Didier Fassin, Anthropology, EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Paris.
Didier Fassin is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and at the Université Paris Nord. He is the director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences and the former vice president of Médecins sans frontières France. He has predominantly worked on the political anthropology of medicine and public health. Recently, he has focused on the economies moral, ie configurations standards and values at work in the social worlds to establish practices , including politics. His research on humanitarianism and immigration has been published in Anthropology Today, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, French Review of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist and Public Culture.
Dr. Imogen Tyler, Sociology, Lancaster
Imogen Tyler is a Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Her current research focuses on how social exclusion is enacted, embodied and resisted in contempory Britain. She is working on a book on this theme entitled Crushed: A Theory of Social Abjection. In terms of immigration, Imogen has written about the figure of the asylum seeker in Britain (2006) and about the representation of ‘illegal’ immigrants in cinema (2007). Her most recent work on this topic focuses on immigrant protest and resistance in the context of Britain’s rapidly expanding immigration detention estate.
Mr. Ruben Andersson [BA (Anthropology) SOAS, MA (Journalism) City University] has worked in the media and the not-for-profit sector for several years, including with the Mexican migrant rights NGO Sin Fronteras and Reuters AlertNet, the humanitarian news website. He has written about migration and migration-related issues in Central America, South Asia and the UK for e.g. Race and Class and openDemocracy.
January 2008 – April 2008
Counter-insurgency:
David Price, Anthropology, Saint Martin’s University, Washington
Filippo Osella, Anthropology, Sussex
Caroline Osella, Anthropology, SOAS
Kriti Kapila, Anthropology, Cambridge
Subir Sinha, Development Studies, SOAS
Rashmi Verma, English, Warwick
Nancy Lindisfarne, Anthropology, SOAS
Rahnuma Ahmed, Anthropology, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Irfan Ahmad, Anthropology, Leiden
Anjan Ghosh, Anthropology, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India
Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Edinburgh
November 2007 – January 2008
The Start:
Alberto Corsín Jiménez, University of Manchester.
