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Dr Shireen Walton
Lecturer (Teaching) in Digital Anthropology
Dept of Anthropology
Faculty of S&HS
- Joined UCL
- 1st Sep 2022
Research summary
Shireen's research engages with digital and visual practices in everyday life, with a focus on image-making, digital media, and migration and mobilities in and between the Middle East and Europe. She has carried out ethnographic research in Iran, Italy, the UK and online and is particularly interested in visual, digital and multimodal research and storytelling in/for anthropology.
Teaching summary
At UCL Anthropology I teach courses in visual, material and digital anthropology and the anthropology of social media.
Current year 2022-2023:
Module convening:
- The Anthropology of Social Media
- Individual Studies in Anthropology
- Introduction to Material and Visual Culture
Contributions to teaching:
- MSc Digital Anthropology core (Digital-Visual Anthropology: Working with Images / Visual Social Media)
- MSc Digital Anthropology practical (Multimodal Storytelling / Smartphone photography)
- Being Human
Biography
- DPhil Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford (2015)
- MPhil Social Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford (2012)
- BA History, UCL (2008)
My doctoral research (2012-2015) was a study of popular digital photography in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. My postdoctoral research (2017-2020) was on ageing, health, migration and smartphones in Milan, Italy as part of the ASSA project at UCL. My monograph, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy, is published open-access with UCL Press (2021), and in Italian (2022) as Smart Ageing a Milano (e altrove).
Previously I was a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London (2020-2022). Prior to this I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017-2020) as part of the ERC-funded ASSA project at UCL Anthropology, and a Teaching Fellow in Material and Visual Culture at UCL Anthropology (2016-2017). I also worked as a Research Assistant at the Centre of Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, on a project about immigration narratives in the UK media (2016).