Our Research Projects

Digital Ethnography is usually used to describe research that is conducted solely online - through social platforms, websites and chat forums - with people whom we might not otherwise be able to meet in person. A traditional ethnographer might have to travel to another part of the world to carry out their research. Digital Ethnographers travel through the internet to their field site or to explore and immerse themselves within particular communities. Instead of relying on video cameras, tape recorders and their notepad, Digital Ethnographers rely on a virtual set of methods such as web archives, blogs and servers. Instead, Digitised Ethnography describes the transformation of a piece of ethnographic research into a digital output. For example, instead of, or as well as, writing a book or article to share the findings of a traditional ethnographic study, a video game or interactive story might be created instead. While video games allow you to win, or to play against them or an opponent, interactive stories, which are the focus of this guide, are primarily about discovering. In Digitised Ethnography, the player is put in someone else’s shoes. This person is usually a key interlocutor and could be someone known by the author of the ethnography, or the ethnographer themselves. An example of this is the open-access digitised ethnography The Long Day of Young Peng.
Andrea Pia

Extraordinary Responsibilities is an ongoing anthropology project conducted among the climate activist youth of Europe and Asia. It studies the prefigurative social, scientific, and juridical ‘worlding’ practices brought forward by young activists during global climate fora and disruptive collective action. What does it mean to take on the single biggest collective problem humanity has ever faced? How do activists make sense and articulate their own political agency and ideas of the future? What world do they aspire to build in the wake of climate change?
Andrea Pia

Justice After Carbon is a collaborative ethnographic and oral history project that brings together a range of local and international civil society stakeholders to investigate the socio-environmental implications of the ongoing transition towards more sustainable modes of energy production in Southeast Asia (SEA). This workshop intends to collect the views of and debate the theoretical insights generated by concerned academics, sustainable energy practitioners, conservationists, indigenous activists, and rights of nature activists relative to China-led hydropower and related hydraulic projects, which promise to power the Southeast Asian economy through decarbonization and rationalize water use across its borders.
Andrea Pia

The People’s Map of Global China tracks China’s complex and rapidly changing international activities by engaging an equally global civil society. Using an interactive, open access, and online ‘map’ format, we collaborate with nongovernmental organisations, journalists, trade unions, academics, and the public at large to provide updated and updatable information on various dimensions of Global China in their localities. The Map consists of profiles of countries and projects, sortable by project parameters, Chinese companies and banks involved, and their social, political, and environmental impacts. This bottom-up, collaborative initiative seeks to provide a platform for the articulation of local voices often marginalised by political and business elites.
Andrea Pia

This coming winter (2023-24) is going to be a difficult season. With the growing cost-of-living crisis, cuts to Universal Credit and a sharp rise in energy prices on the horizon, many people in London will engage in everyday decision making on how to stay warm. People with homes will decide when to turn on the heater and when to turn it off. Precarious private renters will rely on their landlords for the workings of their boilers and for making other changes to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Council tenants in housing blocks undergoing regeneration will face the threat of their heating being lowered to create uncomfortably cold homes, a strategy employed as part of ‘managed decline’ to push tenants out of their homes and make way for demolition. Demands for coats, socks, duvets and electric blankets will rise (Reuters report shows a 8% rise in sales) as people make decisions between keeping their bodies warm or keeping their homes warm, with the latter being more costly. People without homes will be offered blankets by charities and emergency accommodation by councils for days that are decided to be “too cold” under the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol. On the other hand, homes without people will continue to remain warm as several second homes in London will have their heating turned on to maintain the condition of their properties while their owners live elsewhere. Several luxury property managers have advice on their websites about how to keep empty homes ‘winter proofed’ to avoid any material damage in the cold absence of its residents. My project proposes to capture the winter of 2022-23 as it unfolds in London, with a specific focus on the everyday practices of Londoners to keep their bodies and/or their homes warm. I want to understand the process of creating warmth and document people’s relationship with heat in real time, says LSE Fellow Mayanka Mukherji.  To do so, I will develop a shared virtual archive in the form of an interactive “Heat Map”. This is a play on the more widely known data visualization technique called heat maps that show magnitude of a phenomenon as colour in two dimensions. There is also the London Heat Map that has been used by developers, local borough councils, energy companies and others locate areas where demand for heat is at its highest and construct heat network models and assess their feasibility. However, my project will take on an ethnographic approach to develop Heat Maps that will consist of people’s everyday practices in relation to heating across boroughs of London. I will look at the process of creating warmth as a combination of various sensory and material practices, thus expanding the question of heat to look at related questions around clothing, domestic objects and atmospheres, and embodied practices of drinking, eating, and sleeping during winter. Here is a map of London with different heating stories plotted onto various postcodes.
Mayanka Mukherji 

Energy transition projects can threaten to reproduce persistent inequities and disenfranchisement caused by earlier energy developments. Like other governmental actions, policy-making and planning for energy transition are often reduced to a narrow set of future goals, privileging economic opportunity over a comprehensive, multi-sensory appraisal of how social justice and inclusion are experienced locally. Living with the Energy Transition—a creative collaboration between LSE anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys, artist Maja Zéco, curator Rachel Grant, and urbanist William Otchere-Darko—used creative methodologies to explore different ways of sensing and knowing overlapping energy regimes in Aberdeen, Europe’s declared oil and gas capital. 

The project consisted of a series of soundwalks led by Maja Zećo. They involved forms of attentive listening, and drew attention to the slow processes of sonic enclosure—that is, the way that sound travels through and occupies space—which contribute to tensions around energy transition developments. They also moved us beyond the premise of academic research, to pursue an open-ended inquiry into the sonic contradictions characteristic of many contested sites of energy transition.

The soundwalks focused on St. Fittick’s Park, a green space on the southern edge of Aberdeen, UK, partially earmarked for development as an energy transition zone (ETZ). Local opposition to the ETZ project points to the significance of the park as an ecological sanctuary for residents of nearby Torry, a former fishing village and working-class neighbourhood, which has long carried the burden of Aberdeen’s energy and associated industrial development. Living with Energy Transition fostered attentiveness to the ongoing audible transformations of St. Fittick’s Park without overdetermining the result of our inquiry. Soundwalkers engaged in a collaborative knowledge-production—by walking, searching for, generating, and absorbing sound around the park—exploring how the results of (invisible) energy-related politics and planning become audible. The soundwalks

Living with the Energy Transition built on ESRC-funded research (ES/S011080/1) around Torry and St. Fittick’s Park carried out by Dr Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE) and Dr William Otchere-Darko (University of Newcastle). It received additional support from the Anthropology Department’s RIIF Fund from 2023-2024. 

An interview with Gisa Weszkalnys, Maja Zećo and Rachel Grant about the project can be found here. 

“Living with Energy Transition – Soundwalks in Words” provides details on the project background, methodology, and findings.  

Data-driven financial technologies (‘fintechs’; e.g., digital microcredit systems) promise to create economic value but cannot guarantee its equitable distribution. This preliminary research by Teo Zidaru – like the broader project it will yield – seeks to discover new ways of promoting fair access to the value that fintechs generate. It does so through an ethnographic study of fintech use and design in Kenya, where mutual aid practices mediate trust in sociotechnical systems. Probing the forms of trust and mutual aid that arise in interactions among developers and data scientists, fintech users, and between users and financiers, the project integrates the technical and social aspects of entrusting value creation to fintechs, thus bridging data and the social sciences. 

This project by Katy Gardner was funded by the Department’s RIIF fund from 2019-2021. The research focusses on the following questions:

1. To what extent is ‘demand dowry’ connected to rapidly changing economic conditions in Bangladesh, particularly women’s waged labour? Is it on the rise? If so, why?

2. What does marriage mediation and counselling involve in Bangladesh? How are new forms of mediation and counselling linked to wider social changes, such as women’s participation in waged labour, increasing levels of education and campaigns for gender justice?

After shorter trips in 2018 and 2019, fieldwork in Dhaka took place over the first three months of 2020 before being interrupted by the COVID pandemic. Based mainly in the offices of feminist NGOs which give free legal advice to women experiencing difficulties in their marriages, the research would not have been possible without the kind support and collaboration of the Department of Anthropology, Dhaka University, the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association and Ayn O Shalish Kendra. Whilst the research is on-going, so far published outputs include the following:

Gardner, K. 2022 Cool Yourself and Be Strong: Emotional Fixes in the Work of Bangladeshi Marriage Advisers. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 45(2), pp.290-303. 

Gardner, K. 2022  Lost and Abandoned: Spatial Precarity and Displacement in Dhaka, Bangladesh  Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2022.2052925

Gardner, K. 2023 (forthcoming) Divorce Stories: Making sense of the past and imagining the future in Bangladeshi women’s narratives of marital break-down (in Grover, S and Qureshi, K eds Divorce in Asia, Rutgers University Press)

Hypnotherapy is becoming big business in Indonesia. Over 37,000 Indonesians have trained as 'certified hypnotists' with the Indonesian Board of Hypnotherapy since it was founded in 2002. Many more have trained with rival associations. Their services are used in various ways. Some treat clients seeking therapy for medical, emotional or personal issues. Elsewhere, hypnosis has become embedded within schools, workplaces and the family home, where it is used to educate, motivate, and secure a brighter future for Indonesia as a nation. 

This ESRC-funded project, which builds on pilot research funded by the LSE’s Research Infrastructure and Investment Fund, will be the first ever dedicated ethnographic study of hypnotherapy. Combining intensive participant observation of the hypnotherapy scenes in several Indonesian towns with semi-structured interviews of hypnotherapists and their clients, it will examine why so many people in Indonesia have come to embrace hypnotherapy, why they practice it as they do, and the influence that learning about hypnotherapy has had on their everyday lives. It also promises to make a broader theoretical contribution to psychological anthropology by revealing the possible limitations of Euro-American theories of hypnosis and suggestion for understanding hypnotic interactions in a setting where cultural traditions, postcolonial histories and perspectives on one's global situation differ markedly from those in the secular West. 

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Care And Responsibility Under Lockdown (CARUL) is a research collective dedicated to understanding how social groups and institutions reacted to the various challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed and continues to pose. We are specifically interested in how people take care of themselves and each other during lockdowns and during the pandemic in general and how people take on diverse roles of responsibility. Our primary areas of ethnographic interest are Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK. 

Founded in 2020 by anthropologists Nick Long (LSE) and Sharyn Graham Davies (then at AUT, now at Monash), CARUL now has 17 members, with academic backgrounds including public health, nursing, Pacific studies, Asian studies, criminology, and law. The CARUL study of Aotearoa New Zealand offered the first empirical study of how ‘social bubble’ policies operated in practice, and helped to informed policy decisions in the UK and beyond. The collective has also published on a wide variety of additional pandemic-related topics, including homeschooling, policing, bereavement, public narrative, social recovery, and the experiences of frontline workers.

Justice, Morality, and the State in Amazonia (JUSTAM) is a five-year research project that explores how the indigenous peoples of Western Amazonia pursue and enact forms of justice in their everyday lives. 

Click here for more information about the project.

Professor James’s research on consumer debt challenges common assumptions about indebtedness, demonstrating how the structures propping up ‘credit apartheid’ in South Africa disadvantage its victims by enabling creditors to secure repayment with such ease that they have virtually no risk of default. She works with human rights NGO The Black Sash to pursue reforms for the better regulation (and reduced cost) of credit, and to educate poor consumers about the risks involved.

Tackling Reckless Lending and Indebtedness in South Africa 
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Social Grants: Challenging Reckless Lending in South Africa
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The Covid and Care Research Group are building a conversation between policy makers and the UK population over issues of disadvantage and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Congratulations to Professor Laura Bear who has been made Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to Anthropology and the COVID-19 response.