XClose

UCL Anthropology

Home
Menu

Emerging Subjects

ANNOUNCEMENT

Please do contact us (c.penfold@ucl.ac.uk or r.empson@ucl.ac.uk) if you are interested in any of the titles or publishing with the series yourselves.

ON-GOING FINDINGS AND QUESTIONS STATEMENT

and

 

Background to our project: In the last few years Mongolia has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world with soaring GDP growth and foreign investment due to the country's vast mineral reserves. However, the decline of the global commodity super-cycle, coupled with the slowdown of the Chinese economy, has signalled a dramatic passing of this era.

Life in Mongolia is now increasingly characterised by a continuous state of volatility or flux. What were once thought to be givens have been suspended, and certain visions of the future stalled. People talk of an impending 'crisis, but what format this crisis will take, or what beginning or end it may have is essentially unknown. The idea of crisis manifest as a low hum in the imagination of individuals as they go about making their own worlds in this new terrain.

This 5-year ERC- funded project is composed of ten researchers exploring the emerging subjects of this new era of global economic flux. These include how people negotiate resources in shifting landscapes, access to infrastructure and bureaucracy; emergent relations between state, society, and mining companies; the access and use of loans and investments; the politics of debt and crisis; and national and individual trading strategies.  In doing so we reveal how current economic transformations come to shape and are being shaped by people at different registers and scales.

Project description in Mongolian