Affiliated Scholars

Name: Theresia Hofer

Affiliation: Lecturer in Social Anthropology | University of Bristol | Department of Archaeology and Anthropology & Research Affiliate | University of Oxford | Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Title of research: Tibetan Sign Language and Deaf Identities in the Making: Signing and Belonging

Name: Giulia Cavicchioli

Affiliation: PhD Candidate in Anthropology at University College London, UK, Visiting Scholar at the University of Kyoto, Japan, London Arts and Humanities (LAHP) fellowship.

Title of research: SURVIVING THE DISASTERS: Rebuilding life, narratives of refugees’ native place and the role of the media in post 3.11 disasters’ Japan

Name: Leonie Schulte

Affiliation: DPhil Candidate in Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, MSc Degree in Social Anthropology and MPhil Degree in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford.

Title of research: Teaching Germanness: Exploring Ideologies of National Belonging and Language Proficiency Requirements in Berlin’s Migrant Integration Programmes.

Name: Louise Eley

Affiliation: ESRC-funded doctoral student, King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, supervised by Professor Ben Rampton

Title of research: The sociocommunicative organisation of urban space in a diverse Frankfurt neighbourhood

Name: Raymund Vitorio

Affiliation: PhD Candidate, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, King’s College London (Supervisor: Ben Rampton); Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

Title of research: The Discursive Construction of Citizenship and Integration in Singapore

Name: Alice Mitchell

Affiliation: Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

Title of research: Children’s acquisition of kinship concepts, with a focus on Datooga-speaking children of Tanzania.

Name: Rachel Heinrichsmeier

Affiliation: Post-doctoral Research Associate, King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication

Title of research: Local sites of social solidarity: constructing ageing identities in everyday settings

Name: Guilherme Heurich

Photo note: Aritã’ĩno, an Araweté shaman, bringing the dead to sing among the living

Affiliation: Newton International Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UCL

Title of research: Rethinking words and referents: quoting, capturing and forgetting in Araweté verbal art

Name: Lavanya Sankaran

Affiliation: The Centre for Language, Discourse, and Communication, King’s College London, PhD and MPhil: Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge

Title of research: Adult Language Socialization in the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in London (three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, PI: Ben Rampton)

Name: Aeron O’Connor

Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University College London; Visiting Scholar at Pedagogical Institute, Dushanbe, Tajikistan; LAHP-funded PhD Candidate (supervised by Alex Pillen).

Title of Research: Reflecting on times of transformation and interconnection: Oral histories of intellectual pasts and presents, and of dialogues between Soviet and present-day Tajikistan and the outside world.

Name: Panayiota Charalambous

Affliation: Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London; Adjunct Lecturer at the Open University of Cyprus

Title of Research: Ethnographic sociolinguistics of conflict and (in)security, with a focus on peace education processes in Cyprus.

Name: Alice Rudge

Affiliation: PhD Student at University College London, Department of Anthropology, Hunter-Gatherer Resilience Project, the Leverhulme Trust.

Title of Research: Emotion and Aesthetics in the Sonic Practices of the Batek, Egalitarian Forest Hunter-Gatherers in Pahang State, Malaysia.

Name: Liz Fox

Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, UCL, PhD funded by the ESRC.

Title of Research: Waiting for Care: Exploring the linguistic and bureaucratic practices at the interface between state and citizens in an Ulaanbaatar ger district, Mongolia.

Name: Alina Mansurova

Affiliation: Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at University of Oxford, MPhil research. 

Title of Research:  Appraise of the linguistic vitality of the Tatar language among young Tatar speakers in Perm region, Russia.

Name: Chaitanya Kanchan

Affiliation: Department of History/Department of Anthropology, University College London

Title of Research: The Inner Theatre of Empire: Affect, Mind and Power in the ancient Assyrian empire 745 – 669 BC. This thesis investigates the relationship between imperial state power and theories/regimes of mind and affect. Using state and private correspondence, preserved in their original copies on clay tablets in the Akkadian language, I examine how reported speech, lexical and non-lexical affect, and ideological statements interact to create and enforce interior subjectivities for Assyrian subjects, elites, friends and enemies, and how this structured an Assyrian imperialistic ontology.

Photo note: SAA 19 001, “Soothing Babylon”, http://cdli.ucla.edu/P393604, © British Museum

Name: Kawa Morad

Affiliation: University of Exeter, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Centre for Kurdish Studies

Title of Research: Stranbêjî in Contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan: Discourses of History, Heritage, and Tradition. Kawa’s doctoral research explores stranbêjî, a traditional style of singing in Kurdish in contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan. Specifically, Kawa’s work investigates notions of history with reference to stranbêjî, and the politics of its performance. It approaches stranbêjî as a practice and a site around and through which discourses of history, belonging, self, community, and nation are expressed.

Name: Rachel Watson

Affiliation: Postdoctoral fellow on the Crossroads Project, SOAS

Title of Research: Multilingualism in Casamance, southern Senegal

Name: Alfonso Otaegui

Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, UCL; Centro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas (CIIR), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Title of Research: The mirror of memory: conviviality, verbal art and identity among the Ayoreo from the Northern Paraguayan Chaco// The anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing among migrants working in Santiago (Chile)

Biography: I carried out my fieldwork among the Ayoreo (Zamuco linguistic family) in Paraguay (2008-2011) and completed my PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), under the supervision of Philippe Descola (EHESS) and Florencia Tola (UBA). In my dissertation “Nostalgic Love and Sadness Songs among the Ayoreo of Northern Paraguayan Chaco. (An Ethnography of Broken Ties)” I analysed the nostalgic love songs and the sadness songs of the Ayoreo of northern Paraguayan Chaco, combining a discourse centered approach with an ethnography of everyday life. My aim was to show that discourse is not an illustration but a crucial element of social life. After defending my dissertation in January 2014, I spent a year as a postdoc (Fyssen Foundation fellowship) at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of William F. Hanks. Then, thanks to a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I spent two years at the Institute für Vergleichende Kulturforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany), directing my research towards the questions of epistemic authority and political conflict. From January 2018 on I will be part of the collaborative project at UCL Anthropology “The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing” coordinated by Daniel Miller. I will start in February a 16-month ethnography among migrants working in Santiago (Chile), in which I would like to focus on communicative practices related to healthcare and affectivity in new digital environments.