Embracing new global challenges

In addition to our embedded expertise in well-trodden areas, retaining our reputation as being on the cutting-edge of developments in anthropological research is also facilitated through the proactive embrace of new global challenges. This includes work that engages with international environmental crises, human-animal relations, and contemporary imaginings of the future - examples of which are listed below:

Responding to environmental crisis

• A major ERC and Arcus funded, £1.2m project that critically engages with orangutan conservation and the challenges of the Anthropocene;
• Leverhulme-funded research on the extractive industries and changing state dynamics in Africa;
• An AHRC-funded documentary film-making project about conflicts over electricity infrastructure in Beirut

Beyond the human

• A spotlight on human-orangutan relations in the context of the ‘more-than-human’;
• Animal-human relationships and bovine politics in South Asia
• New emerging work on the socio-political lives of insects

Anthropologies of the future

• Central to our ERSC-funded project on education and aspiration is an exploration of what might be as well as what is, and how we might theorise people’s hopes for the future;
• ESRC-funded research on memory in Greece—Remembering Absence—which challenges dominant discourse on trauma.

Communicating across and beyond the academy

• Developing ethnographic narrative as a form for communicating anthropological knowledge in more ethical and accessible forms;
• Using life-history accounts to offer new perspectives on human experience;
• Documentary film, through our Following the Wires AHRC-funded documentary film-making project—to appeal to inter-disciplinary as well as non-academic audiences;
• Communicating our research through blogs