COVID and Care Research Group

Professor Laura Bear MBE, FBA [Principal investigator]

Professor Laura Bear (PhD University of Michigan) specialises in the anthropology of the economy, infrastructures and time. Her cross-disciplinary work rooted in anthropology has led Bear to take up positions as a board member in the editorial collective of Economy and Society; LSE International Inequalities Institute and ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics Research Network. Her current research focusses on the unequal effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on vulnerable UK communities and emerging practices of the public good. 

Professor Deborah James FBA [Co-investigator]

Deborah is a specialist in the anthropology of South and Southern Africa, and has begun research at some sites in the UK. Her work, broadly political and economic in focus, has recently focused on questions of indebtedness in both settings. Her book Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2015) explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion—dubbed "banking the unbanked"—which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans.

Nikita Simpson [Co-investigator and research coordinator]

Nikita is our lead research coordinator and co-investigator of the ‘Innovations in Care’ project. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, and is completing her thesis on mental health, economic inequality and gender in Northern India. She also currently works with the SHM Foundation, leading participatory research and co-design for their Zumbido program; and supporting grassroots mental health innovation through the Ember initiative. She brings this expertise to our research, leading our work on mental health and participatory policy-making.

Dr Fenella Cannell 

Dr Fenella Cannell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the LSE. She is a specialist in Southeast Asian anthropology, and has also conducted research on kinship and religion in the United States. She is contributing to the project a particular expertise on the role of faith-based organisations and SMEs in community support provision during the pandemic.

Dr Nick Long

Nick is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the LSE. His research explores issues related to identity, political life, moral experience, and psychotherapy, with a particular focus on Indonesia. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Nick has been investigating various aspects of life under lockdown through his involvement in the ‘Innovations in Care’ project as well as by leading a comparative study of lockdown experiences in the UK and New Zealand. He has a particular interest in the ways social networks might self-organise to contain the spread of coronavirus, the viability of ‘social bubbles’ policies, and the lessons the UK can learn from New Zealand. 

Dr Insa Koch

Insa is Associate Professor and Director of the Anthropology and Law Programme at the LSE. She has been researching issues of inequality and class for the past decade, including with respect to housing, welfare, the criminal justice system and politics. Her book Personalizing the State is an ethnography of state-citizen relations in austerity Britain and won this year's book award by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Dr Rebecca Bowers

Becky is a post doctoral researcher within the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on gender, financialisation, poverty and inequality. Her doctoral thesis explored how real estate speculation shapes intersecting forms of inequality for migrant female construction workers in Bengaluru (‘India’s Silicon Valley’) and how women work on familial projects of permanence to counter precarious urban employment and residence.

Dr Megan Laws

Megan is leading the citizen science and participatory mapping components of the ‘Innovations in Care’ project, alongside Mapping for Change. She is a fellow in the Department of Anthropology, and her research is on experiences of doubt and uncertainty and how these shape redistributive practices in Namibia and other parts of southern Africa. She is also currently a senior researcher at ExCiteS, an interdisciplinary research group at UCL who work with marginalised communities to develop geo-spatial technologies that can be adapted to local needs.

Dr Teodor Zidaru-Bărbulescu

Teo is a former PhD student and currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the LSE Department of Anthropology. His research explores trust and religious faith in Kenyan economic life, and includes a concern with machine-learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Within the ‘Innovations in Care’ research group, he conducts interviews and contributes to analysis on a range of themes, with a particular focus on data-intensive responses to the pandemic.

Jordan Vieira

Jordan recently defended his PhD thesis in the LSE Department of Anthropology. Using a conceptual framework that focuses on issues of time, his work examines the convergences and social impacts of financialisation, austerity policies, and everyday neoliberal logics on the heavily-gentrified Isle of Dogs in London. Jordan has conducted interviews for the initial ‘Good Death’ report, contributed to the analysis of survey data, and is working on building an East End case study to compare across other regional impact reports.

Anishka Gheewala Lohiya

Anishka is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. Her current interest is the changing landscape of prayer across diasporas, specifically in Hindu sects, though with a wider interest in religion more broadly. Exploring themes such as play, learning religion and universality of categories, her other interests include the relationship between the environment and religion and notions of care and care-giving. Her fieldwork was in Gujarat, India and Leicester, UK where she spent much time doing anthropology and eating Indian food.

Jaskiran Kaur Bhogal

Jaskiran is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her research explores how and why Sikhs perform their faith in the public sphere, primarily by focusing on education, youth, community and social groups. For the ‘Innovations in Care’ project, she has carried out interviews primarily with Sikhs in the Midlands. She has also contributed to analysis of survey data, with a particular interest in how BAME and faith communities are responding to the pandemic.

Catherine Whittle

Catherine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology studying contemporary Christianity, conservation and climate activism in Kenya and the UK. For the ‘Innovations in Care’ project, she has carried out interviews with people around England and contributed to analysis of survey data, with a particular interest in how faith communities are responding to the pandemic, and the impact on children, education, and those with additional needs and disabilities.

Caroline Bazambanza

Caroline graduated from the LSE with a BA in Social Anthropology in 2019. In 2020, she is returning as a PhD candidate studying the intersections of race, welfare and embodiment with a focus on black women's reproductive lives. As part of the research team, Caroline conducts interviews primarily with mothers from across the UK, looking particularly at new regimes of care and responsibility upon women as primary caregivers during the pandemic.

Alice Pearson

Alice Pearson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, researching undergraduate economics education. She has also worked as a Research Associate examining how the Bank of England’s network of Agents assemble understandings of the economy during Brexit uncertainty, including for policy-makers. For the ‘Innovations in Care’ project, she has conducted interviews with people in the North East of England and contributed in particular to analysis of livelihoods. 

Dr Johannes Lenhard

Johannes is the Centre Coordinator at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for the Study of Ethics, Economy and Social Change. His current main research project concerns the ethics of venture capital investment fieldwork for which has taken him to San Francisco, New York, London and Berlin. He continues to work to understand the survival of homeless people better, a concern that he wrote his PhD about with a geographical focus on Paris and London. His current project in this research strand looks at a new form of housing for homeless people, modular homes. For the ‘Innovations in Care’ project, he has carried out interviews with some of his contacts in the homelessness sector in the UK.

Dr Farhan Samanani

Farhan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and an Honorary Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. He has collaborated in this project by sharing insight on the impact of COVID-19 on parents of young children and early-years service providers in Oxford, and through his research with a national network of community organisations, with significant representation from BME, migrant and low-income communities.

Dr Olivia Vicol 

Olivia is co-founder and Director of the Work Rights Centre, a charity dedicated to employment justice. A trained anthropologist, Olivia became interested in labour rights during her doctoral study of Romanian migrants working in London's informal sector.  In the Covid and Care Research Group, Olivia's biggest contribution has been to themes related to economic life. Drawing on interview research and months of participant observation with frontline caseworkers, she documents the inequalities generated by a wage-centred project of redistribution -  which left furlough at the discretion of employers, while allowing gig economy workers to crash into the much thinner safety net of Universal Credit.

Milena Wuerth 

Milena Wuerth graduated in 2020 with a BA in Social Anthropology from the LSE. She is a research assistant, contributing primarily to the analysis and visualization of survey data. During her undergraduate degree, she conducted fieldwork in South London and Oregon, USA, exploring themes from embodied knowledge to sanctuary-based activism.