Dr Shireen Walton

Departmental Lecturer in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology

I am a visual-digital anthropologist focusing on visual, material and digital culture. My research interests include photography, visual representations, intergenerational relationships, and digital-visual practices in everyday life, with a focus on images, migration, and social, political and technological change. I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, the UK, Italy, and online, and am particularly interested in multimodal and experimental digital-visual methodologies for ethnographic research, topics on which I have published and am continuing to explore.

I teach on the MSc/MPhil in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology (VMMA), with a research and teaching focus on visual and digital anthropology, and visual, digital and multimodal methods.

Bio

I completed my DPhil at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford in 2015, during which time I co-founded the Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (OxDEG). My doctoral research explored popular visual and digital culture in Iran and within the Iranian diaspora, with a focus on photography and photoblogging. Subsequently I carried out postdoctoral research at UCL Anthropology as part of the ERC-funded ‘The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing’ (ASSA) project, involving 16 months of urban-digital ethnographic research in Milan, Italy, exploring smartphones, migration, and experiences of age(ing), health, and care. My monograph based on this work, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and Community in Milan and Beyond (2021) is published open-access with UCL Press as part of the ASSA book series, and in Italian as Smart Ageing a Milano (e altrove): Soggettività e socialità nei contesti digitali urbani italiani.

Prior to joining Oxford, I was Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL, and Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, where I convened the MA in Visual Anthropology.

ASSA Project website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/assa/

Email: shireen.walton@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Selected publications

Books

Walton, S. (2021). Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and Community in Milan and Beyond. London: UCL Press, open-access. Also published in Italian (open-access) by Ledizioni (2022) as Smart Ageing a Milano (e altrove): Soggettività e socialità nei contesti digitali urbani italiani.

Miller, D., Abed Rabho, L., Awondo, P. DeVries, M., Duque, M., Garvey, P., Haapio-Kirk, L., Hawkins, C., Otaegui, A., Walton, S., and Wang., X., (2021). The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology. London: UCL Press, open-access.

Carroll, T., Walford, A., and Walton, S., (Eds). (2020). Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies: Perspectives from UCL Anthropology. London: Routledge, open-access.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Walton, S and Haapio-Kirk, L. (2023). ‘Doing Digital-Visual and Multimodal Ethnography with Smartphones: Cases from Italy and Japan’. In Sokolovsky, J. and Pieta, B. (Eds.) Special Issue: Towards Visual and Digital Anthropology of Aging and the Life Course. AnthroVision.

Walton, S and Awondo, P. (2023). ‘Grandparenting and Retirement: Re-thinking Roles, Reciprocity, and Responsibility in Milan and Yaoundé.’ Special Issue: ‘Comparative Insights from the ASSA Project’, Anthropology & Aging 44(2).

Walton, S. (forthcoming). ‘Out of place in Cyberspace: Living Digital Archives in Contemporary Iranian Pasts’. In Johnson, G., and Shultz, D., (Eds.). Photo Archives and the Place of Photography. London: Routledge.

Walton, S. (forthcoming). ‘Care, Communication and Covid: Notes from a Milan Neighbourhood’. In Hawkins, C., Awondo, P., and Miller, D. (Eds.). An Anthropological Approach to mHealth: Health and Care in the Smartphone Age. London: UCL Press.

Walton, S. (2020). ‘Place-Objects: Anthropology of Digital Photography/s’, in Carroll, T, Walford, A., and Walton, S., (Eds.) Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies: Perspectives from UCL Anthropology. London: Routledge.

Walton S. (2018) ‘Remote Ethnography, Virtual Presence: Exploring Digital-Visual Methods for Anthropological Research on the Web’ in Costa, C. and Condie, J. (Eds.) Doing research in and on the Digital: Research Methods Across Fields of Inquiry, London: Routledge.

Walton, S. (2017) ‘Being There Where?’ Designing Digital-Visual Methods for Moving with/in Iran’ in Elliot, A., Norum, R., and Salazar, N., (Eds.), Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Walton, S. (2016) ‘Photographic Truth in Motion: The Case of Iranian Photoblogs’ in Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Anthropology and Photography Series Volume 4, online open-access.

Walton, S. (2016) ‘The Anthropologist as Curator: Introducing a Digital Photography Exhibition as a Collaborative and Participatory Fieldwork Method’ in Afonso, A, I., Bayre, F. and Harper, K., (Eds.) Special Issue: Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Anthropology: Engagement and Innovation. Visual Ethnography, Altrimedia Edizioni.

Walton, S. (2015) ‘Re-envisioning Iran Online: Photoblogs and the Ethnographic “Digital-Visual Moment’’’ in Ryzova, L. (Ed.) Special Issue: Critical Histories of Photography in the Middle East, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications (MJCC), Brill.