Current research
Our research uses comparative and creative approaches to understand social life, advance thinking and engage in real-world 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 intervenes in a diverse set of issues 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
This diversity of work is underpinned by six core research themes:
In this theme we explore the interplay between people, ecologies and infrastructures. As people’s lives become entangled with toxic landscapes and non-human others, how does this shape who people are and what they can be? How are social worlds made out of material relations of creation, repair and decay? Out of what do people make worlds and how do objects and materials make people? Our work in this area ranges from ethnographic studies of road building and the engineering of nuclear futures, research on human-animal relations, environmental activism, climate science, high-rise buildings and the moral economies of just energy transitions.
- climate change, ways of knowing and community resilience in the Arctic and Siberia (Olga Ulturgasheva)
- participation of women in renewable energy (Raminder Kaur)
- nuclear imaginaries, nuclear waste (Penny Harvey, Petra Kalshoven)
- moral economies of just energy transitions (Hannah Knox)
- climate change governance (Hannah Knox)
- road infrastructures and material politics (Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox)
- agribusiness and hydropower frontiers (Chloe Nahum-Claudel)
- state projects in the Andes (Penny Harvey)
- buildings collapse and urban failure in Africa and the UK (Constance Smith)
- human-beaver relations (Mateusz Laszckowski)
- gentrification in Latin American cities (Angela Torresan)
- the agency of objects, ritual knowledge and social change (Soumhya Venkatesan)
It has become commonplace to observe that we live in times of polycrises. But how are crises experienced, how do they manifest and how do they frame people’s experiences and expectations for the future? And what of hopeful futures beyond crisis? We explore these questions through attention to imaginaries, utopias/dystopias and the lived experience of different kinds of futures. This theme brings together the study of digital technologies, AI, space exploration, alongside research on food futures, the future of energy, and the future of the university. Asking question about both the anthropology of the future, and the future of anthropology, we seek to build on disciplinary legacies to open up new and creative directions for our research
- living with Artificial Intelligence (Jennifer Cearns)
- anthropologies of Outer Space (David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai)
- speculative futures for collective energy worlds (Hannah Knox)
- development NGOs, humanitarianism and disaster management (Chika Watanabe)
- decolonising Anthropology (Soumhya Venkatesan)
- political crisis and infrastructural collapse in (post)socialist contexts (Jennifer Cearns)
- unbuilding the future (Hannah Knox, Penny Harvey, Constance Smith)
- religious change, witchcraft and participatory development practices (Maia Green)
- ritual 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)
- GDAT debate on the anthropology of the future (Soumhya Venkatesan)
Movement is part of human experience. But with mobility come questions of identity, belonging, legality, power and race. This theme tackles the question of what happens to people when they move or stay still, what new forms of encounter we find emerging in contemporary migration, and the politics of identity that comes with forced mobility/immobility at a bodily, national and global scale. How does mobility/immobility articulate questions of class, belonging and exclusion? What happens when things move even when people cannot? And how can we put things into motion in new ways through the stories we are able to tell.
- the politics of racism and anti-racism (Peter Wade)
- Palestinian migrants in London (Michelle Obeid)
- migration, forced displacement, uncertainty, political subjectivity and advocacy (Sébastien Bachelet)
- genomics, race, nation and public health (Peter Wade);
- the inner worlds of Motor Neurone Disease (Andrew Irving)
- settler colonial theory and Native American studies (Sonja Dobroski)
- the relationship between pilgrimage and economics (Raminder Kaur)
How do people make sense of the world in which they live? How do they decide the morality and ethics of their actions? And how might this help us understand the diversity of human experience in a globally interconnected world? This theme takes on long running debates in anthropology about what constitutes an ethical life. It explores this question in a range of contexts, from class, Brexit and the rise of far-right activism in Britain to the study of Catholicism in Indonesia, indigenous feminism in Amazonia, and the life course of indigenous intellectuals in Papua New Guinea.
- domestic moral economy and nation-building in the Pacific (Karen Sykes);
- social inequality, nation and identity in the UK (Katie Smith);
- libertarians, freedom and equality in the UK (Soumhya Venkatesan);
- moral articulations associated with postsocialist/ capitalist change (Jennifer Cearns);
- digital and data practices, digital visual communication, mobile media and mobile livelihoods and intergenerational relations, work and gender (Jolynna Sinanan);
- the art of life and death (Andrew Irving);
- stillbirth prevention in Africa (Maia Green)
- moral economies of net zero (Hannah Knox)
This theme builds on the pioneering work of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. It brings together research from across the department approaching anthropology as creative participation. Manchester anthropologists increasingly work with a wide range of media, from film to sound, photography, digital platforms, theatre, exhibition, mapping, graphic novels and more, developing diverse and novel ways of representing and experiencing social life. We think critically and creatively about what these methods offers as well as the practical and representational challenges that they pose.
- the political ecology of noise, sound art practice and the anthropology of sound (Rupert Cox);
- media practices, imaginative lifeworlds and social inclusion (Andrew Irving);
- music-making, embodiment, visual generation, and sensory perception through human-AI relations (Jennifer Cearns)
- ecological perception, learning expertise and audio-visual technologies (Lorenzo Ferrarini);
- ethnographic film and the development of anthropological knowledge (Angela Torresan);
- visualising architecture, materials and urban landscape in Africa and the UK with film and photography (Constance Smith);
- material culture and power in settler colonial societies (Sonja Dobroski);
- tiny human dramas theatre performance (Meghan Rose Donnelly)
- digital and data practices, digital visual communication, mobile media and mobile livelihoods and intergenerational relations, work and gender (Jolynna Sinanan)
- imagining Future Nuclear Landscapes (Petra Tjitske Kalshoven)
- activist theatre in relation to housing (Constance Smith)
- creative energy (Hannah Knox)
Anthropology has always been an engaged discipline – the very practice of ethnography demands complex questions over participation, collaboration and power. But the terms of engagement in which anthropology exists are changing. We reflect on these changes in our research and teaching, exploring the possibilities and limits of engaged and collaborative research with a diversity of research partners. We do this through work with regulators and engineers, museums and theatres, artists, filmmakers and a diversity of lay-experts we meet in our ethnographic research.
- military environments, public health and art-science collaborations (Rupert Cox)
- participation in nuclear waste disposal authority (Penny Harvey)
- contribution to building safety regulation (Constance Smith)
- secondment to civil service design and placemaking team (Hannah Knox)
- training mother activist groups to become film-makers (Angela Torresan)
- working with climate activists and policymakers on public engagement (Hannah Knox)
- collaboration with International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (Jolynna Sinanan)
- visual media, youth resilience and deafness (Andrew Irving; Lorenzo Ferrarini)