School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. My work centres on how lives and relationships unfold over time, the traces that accumulate in their wake, and how they are shaped by, and generate, wider historical transformations. I have conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Philippines and the United Kingdom.

My current book project examines social and geographical mobility in post-1945 central Philippines: how parent-child ties and siblingship propelled the pursuit of upward mobility, but were also transformed by the shifts that they engendered. This project is based on ten years of ethnographic and archival research, and contributes to wider scholarship on the generative powers of kinship and personhood, as well as their complex and ambivalent character. This project builds on my doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, supported by a Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

From 2018-19, I was Research Associate at the University of Manchester, where he worked on the 'Transitions and Mobilities' project, an interdisciplinary study of postwar girlhood and youth transitions in Britain and their implications for later life (PI Professor Penny Tinkler). As part of this study, I was Visiting Researcher at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at the Institute of Cardiovacular Science, UCL. 

I originally trained in development studies and global politics at the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines), where he was subsequently a sessional lecturer and researcher.

My publications are available on the University of Edinburgh's research portal and his personal Researchgate and Academia.edu profiles. 

Find me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/restocruz.bsky.social 

Teaching

I take pleasure on teaching on several undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including:

• Generation and Inheritance: Anthropological Concepts
• Southeast Asia
• Kinship: Structure and Process
• Consumption, Exchange, and Technology
• Undergraduate Dissertation (Supervision)

I have also contributed to teaching on the following courses:

• Ritual and Religion
• Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course