Material Culture

Through long-term fieldwork and ethnographic engagement, we explore how people make, exchange and consume objects. We explore how the material world is central to the constitution of what it means to be human and theorize the social effects of material culture.

Staff research interests include:

• Rik Adriaans | Media and mediation, music technologies, digital politics and postsocialism
• Toby Austin Locke | Attention, self-organisation, neurodiversity and psychosocial entanglements with technology
• Victor Buchli | Theories of immateriality, the anthropology of architecture and extra-terrestrial ethnography
• Kimberly Chong | Anthropology of capitalism; ethnographies of work and labour; race, racialization and gender in the global economy
• Ludovic Coupaye | Technics, technicity, technology and environment, Melanesian artefacts and epistemologies
• Adam Drazin | Design anthropology, Romania, home cultures, new materials, fashion, corporate cultures
• Haidy Geismar | Intellectual and cultural property, new digital objects and contemporary museum practices
• Konstantinos Kalantzis | Visual theory, photography and the political imagination, Orientalism and postcolonial theory, nationalism and localism in Greece
• Susanne Küchler | Fabric, fashion and society, innovation and material translation in art, abstraction, modelling and image based polities in Oceania
• Elena Liber | Memory and storytelling, Ukraine and post-socialism, multimodality, and TikTok
• Danny Miller | Social media, smartphones, care, surveillance and AI relationships
• Janine Patricia Santos | Digital infrastructures, decolonial approaches, digital transformations in the Global South
• Chris Pinney | Visual theory, visual cultures of South Asia, photography and the political imagination
• Rafael Schacter | Public art, graffiti, and monuments; global art, practice-based research, and curating
• Tone Walford | Data and algorithms, knowledge infrastructures and techno-science
   

The Material Culture section founded and continues to edit the Journal of Material Culture and the Journal of Home Cultures. We convene a weekly public seminar in Material, Visual and Digital Culture and run a number of reading and research groups.