Economy, Work, and Social Reproduction
This research cluster focuses on the unique insights that anthropological perspectives can generate about peoples’ engagements with economy. By considering the complex processes that surround how humans produce, distribute, exchange and consume, our work addresses some of the most pressing social issues of our time, such as: human engagements with energy and material resources; experiences of inequality and economic crisis; changing forms of work and employment and their attendant political struggles.
The Department is home to a dynamic community of scholars conducting research in diverse ethnographic contexts. Our work is informed by efforts to relate matters of economy to broader human experiences of gender, kinship, class, ethnicity, nation, and identity. We are interested in how people understand the relationship between economic and social values, and in how inequalities of economic power relate to the way that people conceive and structure their social lives, and what they do to make life better.
Research undertaken under this cluster includes work on: