Social Anthropology in the Community

We have a keen interest in seeing the impacts of our research in the wider community. Whether through the organisation of exhibitions, public events or via consultancy, our members have a long history in sharing the findings of our research with a range of interested parties.

As a member of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, we are particularly proud to host a significant research collection in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which serves both as a teaching resource in our courses, and as a means of engaging a range of stakeholders with our work. Most recently, one of our members of staff, Anita Herle acted as Lead Curator on the Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination (March 2009 – December 2010). To date, there have been approximately 40,000 visitors to the exhibition, which explores some of the different ways that bodies are imagined, understood and transformed in the arts, social and biomedical sciences. During the course of the exhibition, the gallery has been used for artists’ workshops and outreach activities for families and schools (particularly during Science Week and the Festival of Ideas. Gallery staff are currently in the final stages of preparing a school pack aimed at primary, secondary and 6th form students. They have given several interviews about the exhibition, which appeared in local television, local and national newspapers, Research News, Nature, History Today and an audio slide show on BBC World News.

Examples of work in the wider community by our members of staff

Professor Alan Macfarlane who works in England, China, Japan, and Nepal, and also has research interests in Burma and India co-ordinated the following two projects:

Film history of academic lives: For over twenty-five years Professor Macfarlane has conducted filmed interviews with leading anthropologists and others. This has been extended to cover most disciplines in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. This year Professor Macfarlane conducted lengthy interviews with thirty-five scholars. He continues to work with the new ‘Dspace’ project and is currently their major digital video resource. The archival films are viewable here.

World Oral Literature Project: with Dr. Mark Turin, Professor Macfarlane has set up a project funded by the Firebird Foundation to establish a centre for the collection, preservation and dissemination of information from societies where most of the knowledge is transmitted orally and hence fragile. Please see here for more information.

Dr. Martin Walsh, who has an academic interest in Development, has worked as a development consultant and applied anthropologist in Liberia for Fauna and Flora International (Cambridge), in Nigeria for Mallam Dendo Ltd. (Cambridge), in Tanzania for the Tanzania Natural Resources Forum (Arusha), in Zanzibar for ParaDocs Productions (Toronto), and in Kenya and Tanzania for The Waterloo Foundation (Cardiff). He has also undertaken desk studies in the U.K. for the Natural Resources Institute (Chatham), WaterAid (Dar es Salaam), BEES Consulting Group (Johannesburg), and the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation (Cheltenham), as well as for Mallam Dendo and The Waterloo Foundation. Throughout this period he has worked voluntarily for a Tanzanian environmental NGO (The Friends of Ruaha Society) as one of its trustees and U.K. committee members. Since October 2009 he has been employed as the Research Methods Adviser in the Policy Research Team of Oxfam GB. In this role he works with Oxfam staff and partners worldwide to build research capacity, champion research skills, develop new research initiatives, and provide advice on conducting effective research for advocacy, humanitarian and development programmes.

Over the last two years Dr. Lee Wilson has worked to develop a number of projects with a strong emphasis on a more collaborative anthropology. From 2007-09, along with David Leitner, he worked as a consultant to Arts Council East to produce a formative ethnographic evaluation of Ambition, a £1 million Arts Council Initiative to introduce new technologies to arts organisations in the East and North West of England. Developing new methodologies for collaborative evaluation, the research was a good example of the ways in which ethnography can be used as means to evaluate publicly funded projects. The work was carried out under the auspices of Cambridge University Technical Services, and the evaluation reports are available online here.

A project that for which funding was won from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) from 2007-09, on which Wilson was the lead social scientist, was ‘Interdisciplinary Innovation: strategic creation or self organising success? A cross-sector experience’. The research looked at the ways in which innovation might occur when the social boundaries that structure knowledge are crossed, and explored knowledge production in academic disciplines, government departments, companies’ internal functions, companies and sectors, and the boundaries between these domains. The report is available online here.

A recent project with Mary Jacobus (Director, CRASSH) and James Leach (Social Anthropology, Aberdeen), funded by the AHRC and NESTA, was ‘Creative Investment: Arts and Humanities Research in the Innovation Economy’, more information can be found here. This was series of workshops convened at CRASSH to explore the effects of the impact agenda on Humanities and Social Science Research. On the strength of the success of these workshops, Leach and Wilson have been invited by the AHRC to convene a workshop, and write a provocation paper detailing their findings, for policy makers in Whitehall. The aim being to engage with an audience of policy makers, and to challenge some of the assumptions underpinning the agenda to evaluate Arts and Humanities and Social Science research on the basis of its impact.

Finally, a research unit within the division, MIASU (the Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit) has been involved in a range of activities with the wider community. In the past few years, it has put on two photographic exhibitions which have been open to the public: one exploring the landscape and lifestyle of people in Inner Asia, and a second entitled Textual Transformations: Ancient Texts in a Digital Age, a more focused outcome of a research project looking at production and reproduction of texts in Tibet.

MIASU have taken part in two Festivals of Ideas, a series of public events, celebrating the arts, humanities and social sciences in Cambridge. MIASU held an open day at which they had family events, games, calligraphy, dancing, talks, and exhibitions relating to Mongolia and Tibet. More recently, they held a talk with a small display of images and costume.

MIASU regularly holds Strategic Seminars which reach out to government agencies and other interested stakeholders, as well as Research Seminars which are open to the interested public as well as the academic audience. They are currently hosting a number of collaborative research projects working with libraries, museums and overseas institutions. See here for more details.

Activities amongst our graduate students

The majority (67%) of our students stay in academia, and largely within anthropology or closely related social sciences. Of our students who go into other employment, the most significant destinations are NGO and development work, policy analysis either in the UK or abroad, private research, consultancy and curatorship.

Amy Pollard, who submitted her PhD on international aid donors in 2009, has returned to working in the development sector, whilst continuing to publish her PhD research. During her time as a PhD student she headed CUSAS, the Society of Social Anthropologists in Cambridge, organising a range of events of interest to anthropologists both in Cambridge and beyond. She also worked as a consultant for DFID during the course of her research. She now edits ‘Anthropology Matters‘, a post-graduate journal for anthropology students, whilst working in London.

Dr. Charlotte Faircloth, who received her PhD in 2009 on parenting and infant feeding, worked collaboratively with academics from the University of Kent to secure funding for an ESRC Research Seminar series entitled ‘Changing Parenting Culture’ (£17,000, 2007-2010). This series continues to involve senior colleagues in law, psychology, sociology, social policy, health care, history, geography and international studies, as well as a range of users in policy, media and social work. Audio-visual recordings and transcripts of the sessions can be found on the Parenting Culture Studies website. Charlotte also organized an event entitled Bringing up Baby: Parenting, Expertise and the Media. This was a roundtable event which featured the producer of a popular television show which compared various parenting methods. The panel included journalists, policy makers, television ‘experts,’ parents’ representatives and academics, and was widely reported in the national media in conjunction with the University Press office, see here.