School of Social and Political Science

Background

My main interest is in the ethnographic study of kinship and relatedness (which includes topics such as relationships, sexuality, gender, reproduction, memory, and how people provide materially for those close to them). I am interested in exploring how people situate so-called 'intimate' aspects of life in relation to global, national, and local histories and politics- such as through discussing social change and through legal and political contestation, activism, and advocacy.

I have carried out fieldwork in Poland (on fur clothing, small businesses, entrepreneurship, and intergenerational relationships), the UK (on charity shops and ideas about secondhand objects), and in the US (on legal and political change surrounding marriage- and on experiences of being married, divorced, widowed, single, and so on).

Publications

Books

2021. Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense (edited with Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Eirini Papadaki, and Korean Reece. UCL Press.

2019. Material culture and kinship in Poland: An ethnography of fur and society. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Selected articles and book chapters

2022  Invited comment on Heslop’s ‘From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings’. Current Anthropology, Vol. 63, Number 4.

2021 '‘You can learn to do it right, or you can learn to do it wrong’: marriage counselling, togetherness and creative conservatism in Lynchburg, Virginia’' In, Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Siobhan Magee, Eirini Papadaki, and Koreen Reece (eds.). Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense.

2019 'Drawing the adult child: US graphic memoir and the anthropologies of kinship and personhood'. Anthropology and Humanism. Volume 44, issue 1, pages 88-111.

2019 '"To be one’s own boss": Exceptional entrepreneurs and products that sell themselves in urban Poland’. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology special issue ‘The Anthropology of Selling’.

2019 'Talking about kinship', with Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Eirini Papadaki, and Koreen Reece. Anthropology of this Century, issue 25.

2017 'Catholic in Kraków? Fur, the ethic of attribution, and when non-religious things conform to religious aesthetics'. World Art special issue ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives’. Vol. 7, issue 2, pages 307-327.

2016 ‘An “excess of the normal”: luxury and difference in Polish fur critique.’ Journal of Material Culture. Vol 21. 1ssue 3, pages 277 – 295.

2015 ‘Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and inheritance in a southern Polish city’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 21, issue 1, pages 66-85.

*Discussed on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, 25 March 2015.

Book Reviews and criticism

2022  ‘Agnieszka Kościańska’s To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education’. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. 

2021  ‘Kate Strasdin’s Inside the royal wardrobe: a dress history of Queen Alexandra’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 26, Issue 1, pages 908.

2019 'Go to the waves', on Laura Watts' Energy at the end of the world: An Orkney Islands saga. Times Literary Supplement, July 2.

2018 'Not your milk...', on Kathryn Gillespie's The cow with ear tag #1389 and Michael Taussig's Palma Africana. Times Literary Supplement, November 27.

2018 'The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, 2017). Created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood'. Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online, 7: 44-46.

2017 ‘Agnieszka Pasieka’s Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 23, Issue 1, pages 213-214.

2015 ‘Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith (eds.) Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice’. Journal of Design History Vol. 28, Issue 4, pages 453-455.

2015 ‘Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds.) Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 21, Issue 3, pages 691–692.

2015 ‘Tansy E. Hoskins’ Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion’. Allegra Laboratory. Published online 11/02/15.

2015 ‘Jessica Choate Robbins’ “Personhood in Places: Aging, Memory, and Relatedness in Postsocialist Poland”’. Dissertation Reviews, No. 11135.

2014 ‘Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth and Greg Hearn's Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions’. The LSE Review of Books. Published online 18/11/14.

2014 ‘Kaori O’Connor’s The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 20, issue 4, pages 794–795.

2014 ‘Karen Tranberg Hansen and D. Soyini Madison (eds.) African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 20, issue 4, pages 786–787.

2014 ‘Helen Jefferson Lenskyj’s Sexual Diversity and the Sochi 2014 Olympics: No More Rainbows’. The LSE Review of Books. Published online 14/10/14. *Reposted on the Democratic Audit Blog 26/10/14, www.democraticaudit.com/p=8836

2013 ‘Erica L. Tucker’s Remembering Occupied Warsaw’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 19, issue 2, pages 421–422.