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UCL Social Anthropology is a leading centre for the study of how societies organise themselves, the cultural practices in which they engage, and their religious, political and economic arrangements.
Our research, produced in collaboration with the communities we engage with, includes political anthropology, the anthropology of violence and crime, the anthropology of capitalism, policy, race, ethnicity, migration, and nationalism; environmental anthropology and multispecies ethnography; queer anthropology, kinship, and personhood; education and youth; dance and music; and ritual, cosmology, and language.
We run specialist courses on these topics and are actively engaged in research in these areas. We have a weekly public Social Anthropology Research Seminar, with speakers invited from across the world coming to present and discuss their work. Our staff and research students also contribute to a variety of reading and research groups on topical themes in Social Anthropology. We also run the Ethnographic Insights Lab, dedicated to consultancies and action research with external organizations.
Staff interests include:
- Allen Abramson: Cultural anthropology; anthropology of cosmology and worldviews; cultures of risk, play and uncertainty; limits
- Toyin Agbetu: Afriphobia; the politics of identity; critical pedagogy/decolonial praxis; and the social and political anthropology of organisational, curatorial and counter-cultural forms of radical activism resisting racialised forms of spatial or social injustice in public spaces, institutions and grassroots communities
- Apostolos Andrikopoulos: Anthropology of migration and borders; anthropology of kinship and gender; queer anthropology; Africa and Europe
- Lewis Daly: Social anthropology of the environment in indigenous Amazonia; multispecies ethnography in the Anthropocene; the politics of conservation and sustainable development
- Matthew Doyle: Indigenous politics and constitutional reform in Bolivia and Latin America; social movements and anthropology of the state; decolonization; ethnography of radically alternative higher education, including indigenous/intercultural, free and revolutionary universities
- Rebecca Empson: Economic and Environmental Anthropology and its political intersections and overlaps. Subjectivity, hope, affect, and future imaginings.
- Martin Holbraad: Cosmology, ritual and politics in revolutionary Cuba, and the relationship between anthropological and philosophical analysis
- Miranda Sheild Johansson: The sociality of tax and dynamics of fiscal systems; agricultural labour and the value of work; research in the Andean region and Northern Europe
- Jerome Lewis: Play, music, ritual, and egalitarian politics among Central African hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers' and indigenous peoples' rights and representation
- Alison Macdonald: Anthropology of education, social class and youth, personhood and ethics in the context of Post-Industrial UK
- Ruth Mandel: Migration and post-socialism in Europe and Asia, including research in Germany, Southern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia
- Ammara Maqsood: Anthropology of religion, religious difference, kinship and marriage in the context of middle-class Pakistan
- Lucia Michelutti: Anthropology of democracy, kinship and politics, charisma, crime and political violence in South Asia and Venezuela
- Marcas Mag Oireachtaigh: The violent aftermaths of war, genocide, and revolution, in liberal imperial states as much as in those of the colonial margins of Africa and Europe, examined from the perspective of language, difference, racisms, democracy, sovereignty, (post/de)coloniality
- Helene Neveu Kringelbach: Choreographic and musical performance in Francophone West Africa and in migration contexts, transnational families and marriage migration between Senegal and Europe, Francophone colonial legacies, kinship and gender.
- Caroline Parker: Incarceration, policing, racism, ethnoracial health inequality, the Americas, Puerto Rico
- Alex Pillen: Linguistic anthropology, The architecture of the Kurdish language, Translation in times of war