School of Social and Political Science

Research and impact strategy

Two key priorities underpin the research and impact strategy

  1. to enhance research capacity by expanding research clusters alongside supporting independent intellectual projects, and
  2. to nurture rewarding academic careers that integrate collaborative research, teaching, and engagement beyond the academy.

Enhancement of research capacity

Recent strategy has supported multiple internal collaborations including projects that bring together junior and senior colleagues with diverse sub-disciplinary backgrounds.

Examples include:

Health and wellbeing

Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA) brings together the largest concentration of Medical Anthropologists in Europe (if not the world). In addition to holding seminars with external speakers, EdCMA also hosts four networks: 

  • Beyond Resistance
  • Bloodgroup
  • Global Mental Health and
  • Reproduction).

It also organises annual conferences and periodic workshops and roundtables on topics including:

  • Care (2016),
  • Veterinary Anthropology (2016),
  • Hospitalist in the Crossfire (2016),
  • Social Orders in Scientific Biomedicine (2016),
  • Capacity Building for Global Mental Health (2017),
  • Human Animal Health (2017),
  • Politics of the Gendered Body (2017),
  • Autism, Anthropology and Lived Experience (2018),
  • Kinship, Chronic Illness and Responsibility of Care (2019); and co-organises (with Durham) an annual
  • Advanced Workshop for Anthropological Research on Health, Medicine, and Wellbeing. 

Religion in society

SPS is home to the Anthropology of Christianity Bibliographic blog (AnthroCyBib) and the UK’s only Working Group on the Anthropology of Christianity, which has strong links to the School of Divinity’s Centre for the Study of World Christianity. 

Publications on Christianity include three University of California monographs on

  • Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement (Bialecki 2018),
  • Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community (Boylston 2018), and
  • Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Haynes 2017)

In addition colleagues have co-edited two books on

  • The Anthropology of Catholicism (Mayblin 2017) and
  • ‘Christian Citizens' and the moral regeneration of the African State (Bompani 2018). 

Relatedness and relationships

Monographs exploring gender include

  • Segal’s No Place for Grief (on kinship and relatedness, gender and voice, and endurance and exhaustion amongst the relatives of Palestinian political prisoners), and
  • Sharma’s Crossing the Border to India (on migration and masculinities in Nepal).

Blood is the subject of two recent monographs:

  • Carsten’s Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang and
  • Copeman’s co-authored Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India. Our revitalisation of the anthropology of kinship has been sustained via
  • Carsten’s ERC Advanced Grant (with Chiu, Magee, Papadaki, and Reece) focusing particularly on marriage, which included an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Central Library.

Cultures of media

Atelier: Creative Arts and the Social Sciences Network is coordinated by Baxstrom and two colleagues in the Edinburgh College of Art, and is the editorial home of the Taylor and Francis journal Visual Culture in Britain. 

Monographs include

  • Baxstrom’s two co-authored books on film and
  • Wright’s Who’s Reporting Africa Now? Non-Governmental Organizations, Journalists, and Multimedia.

Expertise continues to be developed in cultural heritage through

  • Course’s work on sustainability, culture and language in Hebridean fishing,
  • Fibiger and Harries’s EU Horizon 2020 project on transmitting contentious cultural heritages via the arts,
  • High’s work on endangered languages documentation, and
  • Jeffery’s AHRC project on the intergenerational transmission of Chagossian cultural heritage.

The Bones Collective (Fibiger, Harries, Harper) is concerned with the affective presence and emotive materiality in the exhibiting of human bones.

Emergent themes include

  • design and
  • contributions to the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society

Politics and law

The research team continues a strong commitment to the study of

  • peace and conflict
  • human rights and justice
  • governance and security and
  • migration and displacement. 

Monographs include

  • Dwyer’s Soldiers in Revolt: Army Mutinies in Africa,
  • High’s Victims and Warriors: Violence, History and Memory in Amazonia, and
  • Spencer’s co-authored Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace.

Projects include:

  • Anders’s BA/DfID project on civil service reform in Africa;
  • Bompani, Cooper-Knock, Molony, and Smith’s ESRC project on security and insecurity on the urban margins in South Africa;
  • Copeman’s ERC Consolidator Grant on anti-atheist violence;
  • Dwyer’s ESRC New Investigator Grant on the social reincorporation of peacekeepers in the aftermath of violence in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Uganda;
  • Edmonds’s ERC Starting Grant on combat veterans' reintegration and mental health;
  • Kelly’s GCRF BA grant on the protection of torture survivors;
  • Kelly’s ERC Consolidator Grant with Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Spencer on conscience, ethics, and human rights;
  • Kelly and Sharma’s ESRC/DfID project on the documentation of torture and ill treatment;
  • Kelly and Marks’s DfID project on peace settlements;
  • Marks’s ESRC project on combatants’ economic and socio-political power during and after war;
  • Molony and Dwyer’s ESRC project on social media and security in Africa;
  • Muñoz and Zeller’s ERC work on the changing governance of African transport corridors, border towns, and port cities.

Infrastructures and innovation

Out strengths in the study of international and sustainable development continue to grow, with particular expertise in

  • energy
  • extractive industries
  • infrastructure
  • technologies
  • agriculture and rural livelihoods and
  • economic development.

Since the publication of his monograph on Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India, Cross has developed an extensive portfolio of work on energy including

  • an ESRC/AHRC GCRF Forced Displacement project on energy infrastructures in refugee camps and settlements in sub-Saharan Africa and
  • EPSRC research on distributed ledgers or block chains in East Africa's off grid energy markets.

A cluster of work on the political economy of extractive industries and resource governance includes

  • Spiegel’s ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant on mining and trans-boundary resource management along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border.

A cluster of projects on infrastructures includes:

  • Hackl’s ESRC New Investigator Grant on the gig economy and digital livelihoods for urban refugees;
  • Jeffery’s ERC work on connective infrastructure in the Maldives;
  • Sharma’s ESRC/ICSSR project on low-income migrant workers’ access to basic services and protection in urban India;
  • Sharma’s NERC GCRF Resilience grant on infrastructure for flood resilience in Nepal; and
  • Spencer’s a BA GCRF Cities and Infrastructure project across South Asia.

Increased expertise in agriculture, rural livelihoods, and economic development in Africa, including monographs by

  • Muñoz on Doing Business in Cameroon: An Anatomy of Economic Governance and by
  • Gray on Turbulence and Order in Economic Development: Economic Transformation in Tanzania and Vietnam, and
  • Bowman and Gray’s ESRC GCRF Inclusive Societies project on inclusive industrialisation in agro-processing in South Africa and Tanzania.