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Email: thomas.mcdonald@ucl.ac.uk
Year of start: 2009
Subject: Material Culture
Research Topic
Configurations of comfort: pleasure, place and persons in a south-western Chinese town
Supervisor(s)
Daniel Miller
Rebecca Empson
Introduction
My thesis is an ethnography of the changing material culture of an industrial town and its peripheries in south-west China. Specifically, I am interested in the rapid development of the home through the influx of mass produced domestic furniture, appliances and interiors, especially with relation to how the domestic space is utilised in relation to social relationships.
In this context, my dissertation examines the various ways in which the home is enrolled in attempting to create moments that cement social relationships. I am interested in how this has been affected by the commoditisation of such moments in various social venues outside the home following the reform and opening period and the repercussions this has had upon the nature of the home and the way in which it is conceived and utilised in the performance of social life.
This project is based on 18 months ethnographic fieldwork in the town, including participant observation, interviews, and quantitative data.
Research interests
- Consumption, shopping and social relationships
- Home, architecture and the built environment
- Comfort, pleasure, emotion and ontologies of security
- Kinship and families
- Globalisation, brands, marketing and meaning
- Trade, markets, exchange, economics
- Domestic sphere and domesticity
- China, Asia, modernity, development
- Taste, aesthetics, class, social stratification, wealth
Academic Background/Education
2007 BSc Anthropology (First) - University
College London
2008 Advanced Studies: Modern Chinese - Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2009 MRes Anthropology (Distinction) - University College London
Publications
McDonald, T. (2010). ‘Cowboy cloth’ and kinship: the closeness of denim consumption in a South-west Chinese city. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 8(2). pp. 76-89.
Funding
ESRC 1+3 Quota Studentship
Gilchrist Educational Trust – Fieldwork Grant
Universities' China Committee in London Grant
Great
Britain-China Educational Trust Chinese Language Award
