Dr Will Rollason
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology

Summary

My research is motivated by the question of how to talk about other people in a way that recognises difference while also being able to take account of power, injustice and inequality. I'm fascinated by other people's ways of life, but always suspicious of our ability to talk about them in good faith. Increasingly, I'm unsure whether anthropology should talk about other people at all and how a middle aged white guy like me can practice the discipline in an ethical way. 

These are big questions, and my research career has been varied as a result. For my PhD, I conducted fieldwork on football and sea cucumber fishing on Panapompom, an island in south east Papua New Guinea. That work led me to focus on the ways anthropologists of Melanesia understand difference, and the ways these understandings differ from and conflict with local people's ideas and aspirations. After arriving at Brunel, I did twelve months of ethnographic research in Kigali, Rwanda, working with motorcycle taxi drivers. That project was concerned with the ways ordinary Rwandans understand power, how they relate to state agencies and how these ideas and relations contrast with social scientific theories of power and resistance. 

My most recent work has turned directly to the relationship between difference and inequality by focusing on Melanesian anthropology writ large, and by thinking through the notion of compliance in anthropology. I've also turned to new sources of ethnographic data, engaging with novel objects - insects, airliners - to help me think through power and difference in the global north. 

Qualifications:

• BA 1st Hons, University of London LSE (2002)
• PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester (2008)