University of Oxford

Chihab El Khachab

PRS, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis:Screens: Technology and Meditation in the Egyptian Film Industry (working title)

Research: My research examines how visual media technolgoies - e.g., mobile phones, laptops, televisions, tablets - intervene in daily interactions during commercial film production in Egypt. My objectives are twofold. One one hand, I want to understand in what ways visual media technologies (or 'screens', for short) are physically or materially involved in everyday social interactions. On the other hand, I want to trace an ethnographic picture of commercial film production in Egypt, with particular emphasis on habitual interactions among social actors involved in filmmaking (producers, directors, comedians, technicians, editors, distributors, etc.).

Other research interests: Material culture, visual anthropology, anthropology of art, film theory, American pragmatism.

Selected Publications:
El Khachab, C. (forthcoming, 2013). 'The Logical Goodness of Abduction in C.S. Peirce's Thought', Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

El Khachab, C. (in press, 2013). 'What Becomes of Bodies on Film?' Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Email: chihab.elkhachab@anthro.ox.ac.uk 

Elizabeth Ann Rahman

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Made by Artful Practice: Therapeutics of the Everyday among Xie dwellers of North western Amazonia

Research:  Among Arawakan Xie dwellers of Northwestern Amazonia, childbirth and the perinatal period is accompanied by a rich sensory repertoire including hands-on techniques and bodily procedures that bear witness to the intentionally made nature of persons and bodies. Examining the interrelation between embodied moral capacities and their gradual acquisition in infancy, early infant experience forms a potent basis from which to prepare socially and physically adept and cool-minded persons, able to suppress sensations such as pain in later life (i.e. childbirth). 

Other research interests: Healthcare and wellbeing, Infancy and early childhood, Mindfulness, Teaching Anthropology and the Anthropology of Education. 

Email: elizabeth.rahman@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Emilie Le Febvre

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Visual Knowledge Production in al-Naqab: Bedouin Engagement with Visual Materials and Representational Antagonism in Israel

Research: Emilie's doctoral research examines al-Naqab Bedouin efforts to create ‘visual knowledge’ in Israel's southern desert. Her project investigates the proliferation of visual materials about al-Naqab Bedouin society and describes their reciprocal movement between different ‘regimes of value’. It details the social lives of particular visual collections within micro/macro visual economies in order to explore the emerging value of images and complexity of representational, heritage politics in their society. Her work focuses on a collection of images about al-Naqab Bedouin society and the practices by which members re-read them to structure lineage-based histories, evidence a communal narrative in al-Naqab, or regard them as colonial, iconographic imagery of their society in Israel.

Other research interests: Visual Anthropology, historiography, material culture, and politics of heritage.

Selected Publications:
Palestinian Activism in Israel: A Bedouin Woman Leader in a Changing Middle East (2012) co-authored with Dahan-Kalev, Palgrave Macmillan.

Email: emilielefebvre@hotmail.com

Julien Dugnoille

DPhil, Anthropology
Thesis: The Seoul of Cats and Dogs: The emergence of animal welfare in contemporary South Korea

Research: In 1988, the South Korean government decided to hide every dog meat restaurant in Seoul to avoid potential diplomatic incidents during the Olympics. This marked a turning point in South Koreans' attitudes towards the consumption of dogs within their own society, oscillating, from then on, between guilt and national identity. While cats and dogs are still consumed as food today, animals have also increasingly become parts of Korean households, making them both meat and pet among Korean society. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside three shelters in Seoul, Julien's research investigates the emergence of South Korean animal welfare's attitudes in terms of adoption strategies, euthanasia policies, work interaction and ideological conflicts. It engages with wider anthropological issues such as the study of human-animal relationships (anthrozoology), education, ethics and xenophobia.

Other research interests: East Asia, Visual Anthropology, Philosophy, Cultural Performance, Anthropology of Tourism, Personhood.

Publications:
Dugnoille, Julien (2003). Le désir d'anonymat chez Blanchot, Nietzsche et Rilke, Paris: L'Harmattan.

Dugnoille, Julien (2004). 'La Philosophie du déchet' in Cobast E and R Richard, Culture Générale 1, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (P.U.F.)

URL: http://oxford.academia.edu/JulienDugnoille
Email: julien.dugnoille@anthro.ox.ac.uk 

Juliet Gilbert

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Power through Prayer: An examination of young women's lives in the Pentecostal movement in Calabar, Nigeria (working title)

Research: My research interests lie in the anthropology of youth in Africa, religion and Pentecostalism, and gender. My doctoral thesis focuses on young women's livelihoods in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria. Specifically, I investigate how young women are imagining their destinies, and ask how this social group is reconciling and negotiating their potential futures with their present-day realities. Examining the burgeoning Pentecostal Movement, the popularity of beauty pageants and sewing shops as sites of individualism, business and style, I seek to understand the complexities of young women's lives and the uncertainties - physical, economic, political, spiritual - of living in an African postcolonial city. As such, my research draws on understandings of fear, friendship and fortune.

Other research interests: African Religion (especially African Christianity/Pentecostalism), Gender, Youth, Postcolonial subjectivities, Fashion, Insecurity, Hope, Waiting.

Email: juliet.gilbert@anthro.ox.ac.uk 

Lewis Daly

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: The Symbiosis of People and Plants: Socio-ecological engagements among the Makushi people of southern Guyana

Research: My doctoral project concerns ecological knowledge and praxis among the Makushi people of Southern Guyana. Makushi horticulture far transcends the merely utilitarian, instead constituting an elaborate backdrop to all sociocultural life, incorporating notions of aesthetics, semiotics, and cosmology. My project focuses on the cultivation of the staple crop bitter manioc (kîse) and a category of charm plants known as 'bina'. More broadly, I am interested in how agroecological praxis is intertwined with complex belief systems that concern the ontological placement of the multitude of plant, animal, and spirit beings that compose the sentient cosmos, as described in mythology. Theoretically, I am assessing ethnobotany in light of poststructualism themes concerning Amerindian Perspectivism and posthumanist proposals advocating a trans-species ethnographic focus. An overarching goal is to contribute to the theoretical synthesis of Nature and Society as concepts.

Other research interests: Plants, Amerinidian perspectivism, animism, ecological semiotics, ecology of mind, religion, phenomenology, post-humanism, post-structuralism.

Email: lewis.daly@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Marthe Achtnich

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Temporality, subjectivity, legality: The strandedness of sub-Saharan African migrants in Libya, Malta and beyond (working title)

Research: Marthe's doctoral research examines notions of 'strandedness' among sub-Saharan African migrants, focusing specifically on human agency, aspirations and decision-making processes from a temporal and spatial perspective. Her research is multi-sited and longitudinal, looking first at sub-Saharan African migrants in Libya, then in Malta, and subsequently within various EU member states.

Research interests: Temporalities, time/space. anthropology of time, subjectivities, agency, ethnic identity, diaspora, transnationalism, citizenship, irregular migration, integration, migration and environmental change.

URL: http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/people/students/marthe-achtnich
Email: marthe.achtnich@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Mel Wenger

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Towards an Ecology of Addiction: Narrative Analysis of Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers in the United States

Research: Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers emerged in 1960’s America as separate grassroots movements that utilized a group dynamic in order to address unwanted patterns of eating behavior among their founding members. While both the Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers communities have since spread internationally, each has done so through separate and diverging paths dictated by each organization’s changing community structure, function, and philosophy. Previous work has focused on a multitude of variables between these two organizations, however this research project aims to understand how group interactions within Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous allow for the construction of new consumer identities through their various modes of micro-social interaction among members. Additionally, it seeks to understand the effect these consumer identities have on influencing patterns of eating behavior. By comparing how each community functions today and examining how aspects of food consumption change during periods of rapid industrialization, research findings hope to identify broader social dynamics influencing patterns of over-consumption independent of the commodity itself. This project uses online narratives from Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, as well as narratives made available through each organization’s regular distribution of printed materials.

Email: melanie.wenger@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Melanie Griffiths

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology 
Thesis: 'Who is who now?' Truth, trust and identification in the British asylum and immigration detention system

Research: Melanie's research examines the relationships between various British state-representatives and (failed) asylum seekers in Oxford or incarcerated in immigration detention. Drawing on substantial qualitative fieldwork with these groups, she considers the role of state identification in deciding asylum claims and managing those refused protection. Melanie argues that a bureaucratic conflation of protection with identification places the failed claimants in an administratively ambiguous position and renders them vulnerable to exceptional treatment, such as indefinite detention.

Other research interests: Masculinity, criminalisation of the immigration system, experience of temporalities

Selected Publications: 

‘Vile liars and truth distorters: Truth, trust and the asylum ystem', Anthropology Today 28(4), pp.8-12 (2012)

‘Anonymous Aliens?: Questions of Identification in the Detention and Deportation of Failed Asylum Seekers’, Population, Space and Place 18(6): 715-727 (2012)

‘Establishing Your True Identity: The Negotiation of Discourses of Identification by Detained Asylum Seekers in Oxfordshire' in People, Papers, Practices eds I. About, J. Brown, and G. Lonergan (Palgrave Macmillan) (forthcoming 2012)

'21st Century Bogeymen: Producing and Contesting Categories of Criminal Aliens', in Strangers, Aliens & Foreigners (Inter-Disciplinary.net e-Book, forthcoming).

‘Shareholders, Bureaucrats and the "Queen of Campsfield": An Overview of Administrative Relations at a British Immigration Removal Centre’ (2011), LARES v.LXXVII(1), pp.65-94 (Italian journal).

Email: griffithsmelanie@hotmail.com

Michaela Peykovska

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Sámi Youth in Sweden: Aspirations, Possibilities and Constraints

Research: My doctoral research aims to work closely with Sámi young adults in Sweden in order to understand and recognise their aspirations, future possibilities in life and issues that constrain them when it comes to the preservation of the Sámi indigenous culture. During my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Sweden, deep inside the Arctic Circle, I will focus on the upcoming, modern generation of young Sámi, who have the power to abandon, alter or preserve their indigenous ways. My goal is to investigate what it means to be a young Sámi representative in the 21st century, to determine their life aspirations and to examine the main opportunities and constraints that they face based on their ethnicity, background and origin. I hope to establish a close relationship between these young Sámi representatives and official Swedish, Scandinavian and EU authorities in order to create a more objective and direct connection between the people who need more power to suit their needs and the people who have plenty of political, legal and social power.

Other research interests: European anthropology, anthropology of youth and education, boundaries and identities, cooperation within a multicultural environment, nutritional anthropology, modern languages and sports.

Email: michaela.peykovska@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Rachel Humphris

DPhil, Social Anthropology
Thesis: Governing everyday diversity: local bureaucracy and 'making place' in a super-diverse UK town (working title)

Research:  My research explores how new migrants establish themselves in an increasingly diverse urban area in the UK. I examine both the perspective of new migrants and local bureaucrats to account for the relationship between policy and local practices of diversity. I build on insights provided by Back (1996), Amin (2002) and Vertovec (2007) allowing for the exploration of relationship building in practice in particular spaces rather than starting from expectations defined by attempts to identify pre-existing (and socially bounded) communities. Drawing on research that places importance on banal, everyday encounters (Sandercock 2003; Wise and Velayutham 2009) my research will focus on new migrants' 'local micropolitics of everyday interaction' (Amin 2002, 970). I investigate both the horizontal relationship with various members of different groups and also new migrants' vertical relationship and 'moments of encounter' (Squire and Stephens 2012) with the city and the state. I examine and problematise the reality of 'self-segregation' and isolationism and explore the importance of structural frameworks on new residents' social and spatial mobility.

Other research interests: super-diversity, urban social change, citizenship, transnationalism, public/private space, anthropology of policy, anthropology of bureaucracy, Roma mobility.

Twitter: @rachel_humphris
Email: rachel.humphris@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Rachel Watson

DPhil, Cognitive Anthropology

Research Interests:  Cognitive evolution, developmental psychology, cognition and culture, social cognition, cultural transmission, ritual, imitation

DPhil Research: Social convention, including ritual, is a pervasive aspect of human behavior. A major question for psychological and anthropological research concerns the mechanisms by which ritualized/conventional behavior is learned and transmitted. The current research investigates the possible cues mediating the acquisition and transmission of ritualized behavior. Specifically, I am exploring implicit affiliative motivations as an important factor influencing the development of children’s imitation and acquisition of social conventions through effects on processes of attention and motivation. The current work is expected to contribute to research on social learning mechanisms, causal reasoning, cultural transmission, and the acquisition of social conventions that give rise to behavioral in-group identity markers and social cohesion.

Email: rachel.watson@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Seonsam Na

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: Policymaking in Korean Medicine: An Ethnography of the State Healthcare Governance in South Korea

Research: Seonsam’s research focuses on the ways in which Korean Medicine is being utilized in South Korea’s national healthcare governance where there exist two mainstream medicines, namely Western and Eastern, with the same legal and institutional qualifications. His research, based upon his extensive participation in the state-level health policymaking in Korea, will attempt to characterize first the way this unusual bipartite healthcare system called Yiwŏnhwa operates in the state’s healthcare delivery framework, delineating myriad elements involved in the state’s operations in matters of healthcare service delivery and healthcare industry facilitation. He will then attempt at the contextualization of his findings in the country’s historical developments from its opening in the 19th century to the period of rapid economic and socio-political developments in the 20th century onward.

Other research interests: philosophy of medicine, integrative medicine research, out-patients classification and clinical practice guidelines, medical humanities, phenomenology

Selected Publications
Seonsam Na (2012). East Asian Medicine in South Korea. Harvard Asia Quarterly 14 (4): 44-56.

Seonsam Na, BM Lee and JS Ryu (2012). A Development Manual for Clinical Practice Guideline in Korean Medicine. To be published by Korean Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM).

Seonsam Na (2011). “Korean Medical treatment resulting in the subjective experience of ‘Feeling Lighter’” in Scheid, V. and MacPherson, H. (eds) Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare, Churchill Livingstone, Elsevir. London, 162-163.

URL:  http://oxford.academia.edu/SeonsamNa
Email: seonsam.na@anthro.ox.ac.uk seonsamna@gmail.com

Sonia Lam

DPhil, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thesis: The Post-80s Subjectivity in Hong Kong (working title)

Research: Sonia's research focuses on activism in Hong Kong, with emphasis on the experiences of the Post-80s youths. The research is interested in seeing how these Post-80s problematise contemporary Hong Kong society, and the ways in which they have been mobilised and used experimental means to change social conditions. Of particular interest is the centrality of land-use issues in Post-80s protest movements, linking to wider issues of social memory preservation and identity constructs in the city.

Research interests: Youth Activism, Art and Politics, Popular Culture, Language and Politics, Identity and Social Memory, Spatiality, and Justice, Hipster Culture.

Email: sonia.lam@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Theresa Miller

DPhil, Anthropology
Thesis: Indigenous environmental aesthetics: Ramkokamekra-Canela gardening practices and maize varietal diversity in Maranhão, Brazil

Research: Theresa's doctoral research focuses on the combined ecological, cosmological, social-cultural, socio-economic, and aesthetic aspects of gardening in the Jê-speaking Ramkokamekra-Canela indigenous community of Northeast Brazil. In particular, her research explores how cultivated plant varietal diversity maintenance and loss is related to local theories of value and of knowledge acquisition and transmission. Additionally, the research examines the embodied, multi-sensory engagements between Canela gardeners and cultivated plants, and how these human-plant relationships relate to notions of personhood, animacy, materiality, and symbolism. Theresa is Assistant Editor of Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. She is currently in the field.

Other research interests: Material culture; theories of value and exchange; art and agency; personhood and consubstantiality; native Christianity(ies)

Selected Publications:
Miller, T. Forthcoming in Portuguese.  Growing gardens: towards a theory of ecological aesthetic performances in indigenous Amazonia, Revista Enfoques, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

Miller, T. 2012. Animistic ecological ethics within the Ramkokamekra-Canela indigenous community of Northeast Brazil, UNESCO ECCAP Project, Repository of Ethical Worldviews of Nature.

Miller, T. 2011. Maize as material culture?: Amazonian theories of persons and things, Journal of the Anthropology Society of Oxford 3(1-2), 67-89.

URL: http://therezamiller.wordpress.com
Email: theresa.miller@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Venetia Congdon

DPhil, Social Anthropology
Thesis: Nourishing nationalism: manifestations of Catalan identity through food (working title)

Research: Venetia is researching ways in which the Catalan people of north-east Spain manifest their national identity through discourses on food, cuisine and gastronomy. Due to the recent economic crisis and unhappiness with their position in Spain, Catalans have begun to show increased interest in independence and existence as a separate state.

At the same time, food identity is very strong in Catalonia, as in other autonomous regions of Spain (e.g. Basque Country and Galicia). As with other cultural symbols, this has taken on a new meaning in the context of Catalonia's dissatisfaction with Spain, and their desire to express a separate identity. Venetia's intention is to see how ideas about food and national identities converge in a situation of contested identity.

The main aim of Venetia's fieldwork is to provide a greater insight into the cultural aspect of nationalist movements, while contributing to a more recent area of research within the discipline, that of the Anthropology of Food. She is spending her fieldwork year 2012-2013 in Catalonia, based in the Catalan town of Vic.

Other research interests: National Movements and Identity; Anthropology of Spain and Europe; Anthropology of Food; Witchcraft; Folklore; Anthropology of Business (having completed her first degree at the Royal Agricultural College in Business Management, BSc Hons); Anthropology of Law; Anthropology of Death; Material Culture.

URL: http://oxford.academia.edu/VenetiaCongdon
Email: venetia.congdon@anthro.ox.ac.uk; vcongdon@gmail.com