Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics

16/12/2025

Here are two calls for papers for next year's EASA 2026 conference in Poland.

I have a Dream: Ethnographies of Dreaming Within and Beyond a Polarised World
Convenors:
Fahad Rahman (LSE)
Sahil Nijhawan (ZSL)
Amogh Sharma (University of Oxford)
‘I have a dream.’ This pithy statement is filled with hopes, possibilities, and change, and evokes images of political utopias. Dreaming—in all its meanings—is also polarisation. Does it divide the world into ‘dreamers’ and ‘realists’? How do dreams conform or reconfigure the contours of the world?
Full details here: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2026/panel/18479

Space in a Polarised World: Explorations of Displacement, Resistance, and Governance in the Global City
Convenors:
Jo Hemlatha (LSE)
Arsh*ta Nandan (University of Kent)
This panel explores contestations to intellectual, policy-based, metaphorical, geographical and material displacement in the global city. Focusing on street-first ethnographies, we invite alternative stories of space that parallely continue with capitalist urban expansion, eviction and destruction.
Full details here: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2026/panel/18092

10/12/2025

Call for PhD Applications

Trading Truths: Missions, Mediations, and Extractions in the South Caucasus (TRASUS)

This project, funded by the European Research Council, invites applications for 3 PhD positions based in the Anthropology department at the LSE. Applicants should apply to the MRes/PhD Programme in Anthropology by 15 January 2026.

Summary of TRASUS
TRASUS investigates how religious and political truths move across boundaries. The objectives are to identify the modalities of how truths travel, to propel incisive understandings of how truth-values are attached to collective ideas, and how the resulting truths configure and reconfigure social worlds. Such an in-depth study that theorizes the workings of truth is of paramount importance in an age of misinformation and fake news, in which the transmission of truth is a crucial weapon of power.

📑 Full details are available here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/study

09/12/2025

For the last Friday Seminar of the term, Cla Ruzol will be joining us to speak on 'From source to tap: public water service as a military buffer zone'.

Large dams are promoted by the Philippine government as the solution to Metro Manila’s water problems. Yet, government employees responsible for the delivery of drinking water distrust their own product. If the safety of tap water remains doubted, what then does the water bureaucracy desire to achieve? Under Duterte’s regime, the Kaliwa Dam illustrates how drinking water is militarised, a governance strategy that can be traced back to Cold War anti-communism. While technical expertise for Kaliwa Dam is outsourced to Chinese contractors and Filipino private firms, state engineers are left performing symbolic labour, cultivating self-discipline and loyalty to state authority. The governmental persona of engineers function as security checkpoints, aids to military surveillance, and custodians of elite interests. In this context, hydro-bureaucracies and infrastructures act as “buffer zones” of state military power, absorbing, mediating, or de-escalating tensions between the state and unruly stakeholders, while simultaneously extending its reach.

Cla Ruzol is a PhD student at LSE Anthropology with an interdisciplinary background in environmental science, urban studies, and community-based management. Their PhD research examines public water service in Metro Manila by situating large dam building in the colonial history of the Philippines and by engaging autoethnographically with contemporary military authoritarianism.

04/12/2025

We’re thrilled that we’ve been ranked 2nd in the UK for Anthropology in The Times University Rankings 2026! ✨

This is testament to the dedication of our staff and students and the fantastic community here in the department. We’re passionate about teaching, and proud of the ground-breaking research conducted by staff and students.

Learn more about our programmes and research on our website: https://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology

03/12/2025

If you missed our public lecture 'Spreading it around: a new look at redistribution and tax' you can watch the lecture via the link below.

In this panel discussion, anthropologists working on redistribution and tax will present the findings of—and interrogate each other on—two recent books: Clawing Back: redistribution in precarious times, and Anthropology and Tax: ethnographies of fiscal relations.

Anthropologists view redistribution in unusual ways. In exploring how people pay for what they need and want, we consider how allocative processes operate beyond those tried and tested in the heyday of the welfare state. Typically, incomes are earned through wage work, or people revert to benefits. Yet austerity has reduced welfare systems in the North, while those in the South are under-developed. To make ends meet, people use both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ resources, payments and economic relationships, creating larger networks of redistribution. They seek new ways to supplement meagre incomes, combining work, welfare and debt. But, as Deborah James shows, combining these three income sources is not straightforward: it requires canny intervention by local advisers on the one hand and householders on the other. Meanwhile, contributions, tributes and tithes, as shown by Miranda Sheild Johansson, Johanna Mugler and Robin Smith, enable taxation beyond the exchequer. Their focus on fiscal systems looks at how the sharing, extraction, and flow of resources not only produce economic realities but also shape relations of belonging, dependence, and exclusion, as well as social and philosophical categories regarding work, and value.

In this panel discussion, anthropologists working on redistribution and tax will present the findings of—and interrogate each other on—two recent books: Claw...

02/12/2025

Darlène Dubuisson is joining us for this week's Friday Seminar to speak about '"Mezanmi!": Grief amid Hypernormalisation in Haiti and the United States'.

'This paper combines autoethnography and ethnographic interview with a historically and ethnographically grounded critical analysis to explore grief in a context of ‘hypernormalisation,’ where certain types of death-related and non-death-related loss are trivialised through the normalisation of the absurd. The paper specifically examines the hypernormalisation of immigration enforcement in the U.S. and ensekirite (insecurity) in Haiti, which are interrelated manifestations of the normalised absurdities of racism (e.g., anti-Blackness) and coloniality. It shows how this context of hypernormalisation seeks to obscure possibilities of intersubjective grief by rendering the lives of Haitian immigrants and Haiti’s marginalized Black majority ‘ungrievable,’ to use Judith Butler’s apt term. Engaging the Haitian Kreyòl term ‘mezanmi’ (literally, ‘my friends’) as an invocation of shared grief, the paper argues that collectively mourning the so-called ‘ungrievable’ becomes a subversive act in the face of this hypernormalisation.'

Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies. Dubuisson’s geographic areas of interest include the Caribbean and Latin America. She is the author of Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2024), which received the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) Annual Book Award.

26/11/2025

Mathilde Heslon joins us this week for our Friday Seminar to speak about 'What we learn from pain. Ritual transformation around inflicted pain in a French overseas department (Mayotte)'.

"This presentation is based on an observation: in Mayotte, the pain inflicted in certain rituals, which was once considered essential to their effectiveness, is now increasingly criticised and sometimes abandoned. Thus, rituals of defloration and fumigation, once central to the structuring of social relations between humans and with spirits, are now strongly contested, while circumcision tends to be performed under anaesthesia to avoid suffering. The study of these transformations sheds light on the tensions between the continuity of Mayotte's ritual practices and the redefinition of their values in a context marked by French departmentalisation and the circulation of reformist Islamic ideologies. But above all, this research contributes to the anthropology of ritual by questioning the place of pain as an interactive experience: its critique reveals both the social and political recompositions in Mayotte and the fragilities of the ‘serious fiction’ (Severi) that underpins the effectiveness of ritual."

Mathilde Heslon is an anthropologist, holds a doctorate from EHESS, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Fyssen Foundation, affiliated at the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on care practices, rituals and social dynamics in Mayotte and the Indian Ocean.

These seminars are open to the public on a first come first served basis.

20/11/2025

For our Friday Seminar this week we are delighted to be joined by Nick Osborn, who will speak on 'Plantations Envisioned as Sovereign Orders in a Post War Landscape'.

What can sovereignty projects look like in Post-War settings? In this talk, I draw on extended fieldwork in Guatemalan coffee plantations to argue that plantations are political-economic assemblages that must be considered part of the landscape of ‘multiple sovereignties’ that characterise Post-War settings in Latin America.

Nick is an early-career social anthropologist who has just completed his PhD at the LSE.

These seminars are open to the public on a first come first served basis.

14/11/2025

New event📢

RAI Huxley Memorial Lecture: The Moral Question - Prof Didier Fassin

6:00pm Friday 5th December 2025

Hosted by The Royal Anthropological Institute and LSE Department of Anthropology

In-person public event (The Sheikh Zayed Theatre)

Please book here 👉 https://ow.ly/9Pvv50XjaHS

11/11/2025

For our Friday Seminar this week we are joined by Jovia Salifu who will speak on 'Reinterpreting substantivism: Multiple economic rationalities in the margins of capitalism'

'In anthropology, substantivism has bequeathed to us the notion that multiple economic rationalities operate at any given time or place, as opposed to a universal human instinct of utility maximisation. However, this tradition has also fostered a tendency to create models to describe economic conduct cross-culturally. This paper raises questions about these models which divide economic behaviour into spheres such as market and community. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from Ghana, it argues that economic behaviour in places which can be described as the margins of global capitalism is so embedded that the boundaries between these spheres dissolve in real life. As building construction workers deploy custom and magic to further their maximisation ends, market women navigate the world of microcredit while prioritising their obligations to kin. Both of these groups mix and match market and communal economic logics so well that the boundaries have ceased to exist for them.'

Jovia Salifu holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and is currently a lecturer at the University of Education, Winneba in Ghana where he has taught for over four years. He has expertise and research interest in the economy, contemporary livelihoods in Africa, and the connection between economic activities and social/cultural processes. He has published his research in top journals such as Africa and African Studies Review.

These events are open to the public on a first come, first served basis.

07/11/2025

Gisa Weszkalnys is part of the Alternatives to Extractivism collective who've written 'Alternatives to Extractivism. A manifesto of propositions and unresolved questions'. A manifesto which explores how researchers can better attend to the diversity of ways of being, knowing and doing alongside the (sub)soil and other-than-humans more broadly.

Read the manifesto here: https://allegralaboratory.net/alternatives-to-extractivism-a-manifesto-of-propositions-and-unresolved-questions/

On Thursday the 20th of November, 12.00-13.30 CET, the Alternatives to Extractivism collective will launch its Manifesto of Propositions and Unresolved Questions. During the Launch, its makers will share what ambitions the manifesto was developed, and how it came into being through an international collaboration between academics and artists during workshops held at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique. This will be followed by a presentation and discussion on the manifesto's contents.
We look forward to discussing the manifesto with you!

You can find us here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82618596381?pwd=iAois0bcaWaMi4XFDzxY0hs5QHCeiI.1