Monday 9 May 2022 12:00pm to Tuesday 10 May 2022 6:00pm
Online - by email invitation
About
Have you been wondering what you can do with a Social Anthropology degree? In this online event, graduates from our department will answer your questions and talk about how their careers developed after their degree, and how social anthropology informs their current work.
Speakers will talk for 10-15 minutes, and the rest of the session will be open for you to ask them questions about their own experiences, about the role of social anthropology in their professional life today, and about what kinds of opportunities exist in their line of work.
To sign up for the sessions that interest you, please complete this Google form - https://forms.gle/inr5wRJ5UFApWdWN9
Monday 9 MayDr Paul Killworth
Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security
After studying Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate, I completed my PhD 1997, researching the culture of the British Army. After a period of post-doctoral research, I joined the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), one of UK's intelligence and security agencies. I've since worked across government in a range of roles, both in the UK and overseas. I'm now the Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security, responsible for giving independent scientific advice on national security issues, and helping to tackle cross departmental issues. I remain an enthusiastic supporter of behavioural science, and of the cross-government network of social anthropologists.
Emily Parker
Critical Care Doctor
I graduated in Social Anthropology in 2011 and wrote my dissertation about the influence of mobile phones on pre-marital relationships in rural north India. After graduating I lived in Berlin for 1.5 years, where I spent time living a slower pace of life than a Cambridge degree allows, learning German, and volunteering with various community projects. I also did a 3-month research assistant internship with Amnesty International at their Berlin office. On returning to the UK I worked as a Fundraiser and Project Manager for two different London regeneration projects. These experiences helped me to realise I wasn’t cut out for an office job, and I began to make the switch to clinical work with a job as an Occupational Therapy Assistant in neuro-rehabilitation. I was lucky to be successful in my application for the Newcastle University accelerated medicine programme, which I completed in 2019, and I am now working as an Intensive Care Doctor. My background in Social Anthropology continues to inform my career choices, and I am grateful for the perspective it gives me on my work.
Simon Patterson
Managing Director, Silver Lake
I joined Silver Lake in 2005 and am a Managing Director and co-head of the firm's activities in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I am currently a board member of Dell Technologies, IVC Evidensia, RAC and ZPG, and previously served on the boards of Skype, Cegid, Intelsat, FlixBus, MultiPlan, and Gerson Lehrman Group. Prior to joining Silver Lake, I was a member of the founding management team of the logistics software company GF-X (acquired by Descartes) and worked in various management roles at the Financial Times. I am a Trustee of the Natural History Museum in London, a Trustee and Vice Chairman of The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and a Non-Executive Director of Tesco plc. I hold an M.A. from King’s College, Cambridge University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where I was an Arjay Miller Scholar and received the Alexander Robichek Award for Finance.
Dr Jan-Jonathan Bock
Head, Business Council for Democracy, Hertie Foundation, Germany
I received my PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015, for a doctoral thesis about citizenship and political life in the wake of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. I subsequently worked as Research Fellow at the interdisciplinary Woolf Institute, Cambridge, examining intercultural and interreligious relations across settings that included Italy, Germany, India and the Gulf region. I then became Programme Director of Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, designing and delivering education programmes for global future leaders in the fields of democracy, social cohesion and pluralism. I currently lead the Business Council for Democracy (BC4) for the Hertie Foundation, one of Germany’s largest philanthropic organisations, based in Berlin. With the BC4D, I developed a network of businesses and companies that aspire to strengthen German democracy and provide civic education programmes on digital citizenship for their employees (introducing new visions of corporate political responsibility into German culture).
Johannes Laubmeier
Writer
I received an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2014, as well as an MA in Critical and Cultural Theory from Cardiff University (2013) and a BA in Journalism (2012) from the University of Eichstätt (Germany).
I live in Berlin, working as a writer and translator. My reportage "The quest to identify Victim #13 - one of the thousands of migrants who have died crossing the Mediterranean”, published in the Sunday Times Magazine was shortlisted at the British Journalism Awards in 2017 in the category "New Journalist of the Year”. My first novel “Das Marterl” was published in Germany in 2022, and explores themes of memory, nostalgia and loss.
Tuesday 10 MayAdam James Smith
Assistant Professor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University and Affiliated Filmmaker, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
I am a US-based filmmaker and educator, originally from the United Kingdom. I hold an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford University and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. As an educator, I teach subject matter as varied as digital filmmaking, the history and power of storytelling, Chinese cinema, and media entrepreneurship. My filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. My first feature film, The Land of Many Palaces (2015), explores the Chinese "ghost city" of Ordos, and my follow-up feature film, Americaville (2020), was shot in a replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming on the outskirts of Beijing. Both films premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and have screened at festivals, on television, and at academic institutions around the world, including Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Columbia, USC, UCLA, the Asia Society, the Munk School of Global Affairs, and beyond. My films have been supported by the Sundance Institute, the Asian Cinema Fund, the Whicker's Foundation, and other organizations.
After graduating from Cambridge in 2016, I relocated to Miami, Florida to begin my Assistant Professorship in documentary filmmaking and multimedia production at Florida Atlantic University. Most recently, I have been working on a new body of observationally-driven documentary work in the USA, collectively titled The Heartland Project. Frontier (in post-production) is an experimental meditation on the abandoned ghost towns and prairies of North Dakota awakened by an oil boom. Okmulgee Invitational (in production), documents America’s largest and longest-running black rodeo hosted every August in Muscogee Nation, Oklahoma. Loud City (in production) follows a team of black cowboys as they take on the rodeo circuit around the United States. I am also currently working on my first project in Japan - a documentary remake of the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation, involving tourists in Tokyo reenacting scenes and frames from the original film for their social media accounts, titled Forever Lost (in pre-production). This new work features some oversight from the Visual Anthropology Lab at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Jonathan Woolley MA, MPhil Cantab
User Research and Insight Lead, Local Nature Recovery: Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
The central aim of my career is to understand the relationships between humans and the environment, and to identify how those relationships within Western societies might be healed. My interest ranges from the pragmatic power of paperwork and property rights to the numinous qualities of sacred springs, revealed through the ethnographic examination of the English countryside.
I was awarded a PhD in April 2018 from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My doctoral research explored the concept of “common sense” ethnographically, establishing how systemic transformations in English culture have shaped land management practices amongst farmers, local officials, and conservationists in the Broads National Park in Norfolk. My monograph was published by Routledge as Common Sense in Environmental Management: Thinking Through English Land and Water (2020), and I have also published a number of articles and book chapters on folklore, environmental activism, and contemporary British Druidry.
As a Postdoctoral Affiliate of the Department, I was an active member of Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research on the Environment (CIRE). Through this network, I gained an active interest in the power of anthropology to transform public policy. I joined the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs in 2018, becoming a member of the Social Research Profession. Since then, I have specialised in using behavioural insight and user research to inform the design and development of the UK Government’s Environmental Land Management schemes - a set of funding programmes that will help land managers to sequester carbon, improve biodiversity and deliver other environmental benefits. I am also the lead for the Whitehall Anthropology Network.
Paola Perrin de Brichambaut
Research Associate at the Berlin University of the Arts
Since completing an MPhil in Social Anthropology in 2019, I have worked in citizen engagement, democracy education and research. I developed and managed a democracy education and youth dialogue project with Social Science Works, a social enterprise based in Potsdam (Germany). The aim of the project was to encourage over 300 pupils in Berlin and Brandenburg to deliberate on the European Union, its values and future, and their rights and responsibilities as citizens, in order to come up with concrete policy resolutions in the main political areas they found important. These were then presented to and deliberatively discussed with European Union Parliamentarians during a conference with elected pupils representing each school. I also completed a traineeship at the European Commission, during which I followed the implementation of EU Migration and Home Affairs funds in politically sensitive programme areas in Greece. Most recently I have started a position as research associate at the Berlin University of the Arts, where I will be developing citizen engagement and stakeholder consultation formats related to the transformations needed to address the climate crisis at the Berlin level.
Dr David Ginsborg
Strategist at Gemic Berlin
I began my studies at the Department all the way back in 2011, and obtained my PhD in 2021. I have since moved back to Italy, my home country, from where I have been working with Gemic, a global strategy and innovation consultancy that focuses on providing brands and companies with insights rooted in culture. Anthropologically-minded consulting is a growing industry, and my Cambridge Social Anthropology background positioned me uniquely well for the job.
Helena Spector
Barrister
After finishing my Social Anthropology undergraduate degree, I had a year out where I went to South Africa and worked in the field of asylum/immigration. I returned to Cambridge and completed the MRes programme in Social Anthropology, which was a great experience. I then completed two years of law school and began a career as a barrister, specialising in criminal and public law. I’ve recently moved out of London and now practice in the North East of England.
To sign up for the sessions that interest you, please complete this Google form - https://forms.gle/inr5wRJ5UFApWdWN9