Projects
Explore some of our current and recent research projects in Social Anthropology.
Funder: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
Dates: April 2019 – April 2027
Details: Constance Smith was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project examining how urban success and failure is imagined and materialised in relation to the tower block. Starting with specific cases of tower block failure in Nairobi and London, specifically the Grenfell Tower fire and a spate of building collapses in Nairobi, the project critically engages with notions of ‘failure’, examining how it unfolds in the world, and what it sets in motion. Combining approaches from urban anthropology with urban studies, material culture studies and participatory urban design, the project works closely with communities as well as urban practitioners, artists and organisers.
Funder: ESRC
Principal Investigator: Hannah Knox
Dates: October 2023 – March 2027
Details: This is an ethnographic study of community and municipal energy projects in the UK. By studying the everyday work of bringing about energy transitions, we explore how experiments with new technologies and practices of renewable energy generation, distribution, conservation, supply and visualisation, are shifting understandings of what energy is and how it should be addressed as a tool of social reproduction.
Funder: AHRC
Co-Investigator: Peter Wade & Research Associate: Abeyamí Ortega
Dates: March 2021-June 2024
Details: This project explores the relationship between race, particularly Blackness and Indigeneity, and comics production in Latin America. The research has a historical element, working in archives in Argentina, Colombia and Peru, while researchers also engage with a diverse set of comic artists in each country.
Funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Toyota Foundation.
Principal Investigator: Rupert Cox
Dates: 2015-2025
Details: This project began with a focus on the impact of aircraft noise from US military bases. It now includes a broader category of sounds that create a new awareness of environmental change and traumatic memory.
Find out more by exploring two audio-visual works: Kiatsu: The Sound of The Sky Being Torn and The Cave Mouth and The Giant Voice.
Funder: Dalton Institute for Nuclear Research
Principal Investigator: Penny Harvey & Co-Investigator: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
Dates: 2020-2025
Details: This is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary research network which seeks to foster engagement between the nuclear sciences and social research, including anthropology, organisation and business studies, law, history, and science and technology studies.
Funder: UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC)
Co-Investigator: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
Dates: 2020-2025
Details: This is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary research network which seeks to foster engagement between the nuclear sciences and social research, including anthropology, organisation and business studies, law, history, and science and technology studies.
Funder: ESRC
Principal Investigator: Petra Tjitske Kalshoven & Research Fellow: Sarah O'Brian
Dates: April 2022 - April 2026
Details: This project looks at models as a way of forecasting, and enchanting, the future, focussing on sites of nuclear decommissioning and waste management. The aim is to understand what people’s assumptions about possible futures are in areas of decommissioning, in which moral frameworks they are rooted, and how these enhance or hamper imaginations of the future.
Funder: ESRC
Co-Investigator: Maia Green
Dates: Dec 2021 - June 2025
Details: Maia Green is Co-Investigator on research into what drives urbanisation in Ghana and Tanzania and how urbanisation contributes to employment and economic growth through a study of the economy of self-build housing in two established cities and two fast-growing towns. It is led by Clare Mercer (LSE) with Maia Green as co-investigator.
Funder: National Science Foundation
Co-Investigator: Olga Ulturgasheva
Dates: 2015-2022
Details: This project was led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal was to discover indigenous patterns of adaptive and resilient responses to critical situations, through an exchange of knowledge between members of two arctic communities in Alaska and Siberia.
Funder: Toyota Foundation, British Academy and Leverhulme Trust
Principal Investigator: Chika Watanabe
Dates: 2015-2022
Details: This research was funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme (2016 to 2018) and the Toyota Foundation (2019 to 2022). It took 'preparedness' in disaster risk reduction efforts as an ethnographic artefact to study how catastrophic pasts and futures are made present through material and bodily practices.
Specifically, Chika Watanabe explores how various actors design, learn, embody, and export/import Japanese disaster preparedness (bosai) education/training efforts around the world, particularly in Chile.
She explores the possibility that 'playful' approaches, such as using child-friendly games, can be effective methods for translating values across countries and embedding preparedness in people’s everyday lives.
Find out more about the project here.
The Toyota Foundation-funded research also included and led to Voices of Resilience (Voces de Resiliencia), a collaborative and action-research project collecting life histories of older people and exploring the strength of intergenerational relations in disaster resilience.
For more information on this project, visit the Voices of Resilience website.
Funder: AHRC
Principal Investigator: Peter Wade, & Co-Investigators: Lúcia Sá and Ignacio Aguiló
Dates: 2020-2023
Details: This large research project continues Peter Wade’s previous research on anti-racist actions in Latin America. The project explores how artists in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia address racial diversity in their work and how they use art to challenge racism.
The project involves:
- Three post-doctoral researchers (Ana Vivaldi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Carlos Correa Angulo).
- Three Latin American collaborators (Ezequiel Adamovsky from the Universidad Nacional San Martín, Felipe Milanez from the Universidade Federal da Bahia, and Mara Viveros Vigoya from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia).
- Three Latin American advisers (Alejandro Frigerio from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, Pedro Mandagará from the Universidade de Brasília, and Liliana Angulo, an Afro-Colombian artist).