Our Research Projects

The Environment and the Anthropocene are important research themes which the department is developing. Read more about projects that focus on these issues here

The project—Nambawan Piksa (First Films)—focuses on the first known moving images in Papua New Guinea (PNG): twelve reels of film footage that record twenty dances.  These films were made in 1904 by the Daniels Ethnographical Expedition to British New Guinea, organized by LSE anthropologist Charles G. Seligmann (1873-1940).  Today these reels are held by the British Film Institute (BFI) and have never been officially shared with communities in PNG.  The Nambawan Piksa project will finally bring the films together with communities in which descendants of the people featured in them now live. 

This three-year project began in September 2025.  The BFI will digitize and share the films with PNG's National Film Institute (NFI) and Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies (IPNGS).  IPNGS will facilitate reconnection with PNG communities to explore the dances' contemporary significance.  NFI will archive the films and produce a documentary on reconnection work.  The LSE Film and Audio Unit will produce two documentaries on the films' UK history, including the Seligmann expedition and related collections at the LSE, BFI, British Museum, and Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  The project website will showcase the digitized film clips, related collections and research, and documentaries. 

Nambawan Piksa examines the colonial origins and cultural history of PNG's earliest films.  Through research, community engagement, documentaries, and publications, the project will problematize the films' colonial history while reconnecting them with descendant communities.  This work benefits PNG communities and institutions while engaging academic and public audiences worldwide, contributing to ongoing efforts to decolonize archival practice and anthropology. 

This AHRC-funded project, hosted by the LSE, is led by Prof. Michael W. Scott (Anthropology, LSE), with Dr Naomi Faik-Simet (IPNGS) as International Co-Lead.  Research associate Dr Vicky Barnecutt will conduct historical and collections research at LSE, while Prof. Don Niles, a research associate, will support reconnection efforts at IPNGS.  The British Film Institute, Papua New Guinea's National Film Institute, and the British Museum are project partners, with additional support from Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  IPNGS and NFI are national cultural institutions under Papua New Guinea's Ministry for Tourism, Arts, and Culture. 

For further information, please visit the project’s webpage: https://www.nambawanpiksa.org

This project, by Wesam Hassan, is funded by the Department’s RIIF fund since 2025. It explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is being introduced, understood, and used in everyday healthcare settings. Rather than treating AI as a purely technical innovation, the project examines AI as a social and ethical intervention that reshapes how medical decisions are made, how responsibility is distributed, and how care is experienced by both clinicians and patients. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt and Turkey, the research follows doctors, nurses, medical trainees, and hospital administrators as they encounter AI tools such as diagnostic software, triage systems, and decision-support platforms. These tools are often presented as objective, efficient, and future oriented solutions to healthcare pressures. In practice, however, they are embedded in existing systems marked by resource constraints, regulatory uncertainty, professional hierarchies, and uneven trust in institutions. 

At this early stage of the project, the central question  is how AI changes the experience of uncertainty in medicine. Clinical work has always involved judgement under conditions of incomplete information. AI promises to reduce uncertainty by offering predictions, risk scores, or recommended actions. Yet these systems also introduce new forms of uncertainty. Clinicians must decide when to trust an algorithm, when to override it, and who is responsible if something goes wrong. Patients, in turn, must navigate unfamiliar forms of expertise that are not fully human, but not fully transparent either. By comparing healthcare settings in Egypt and Turkey, the project highlights how AI adoption is shaped by local political economies, medical training systems, and moral expectations of care. In both contexts, AI is not simply adopted or rejected. It is adapted, negotiated, sometimes resisted, and often repurposed in ways that reflect broader struggles over accountability, professional authority, and the future of public healthcare. The project is ongoing and aims to contribute to debates on digital health, global inequalities in medical innovation, and the ethics of automation. The project is designed to be implemented on different stages addressing different questions and participants and build on the findings from each stage. It also aspires to offer grounded observations and feedback for policymakers, educators, and healthcare institutions seeking to introduce AI technologies in ways that support, rather than undermine, meaningful healthcare.

The project is conceptualized and co-led by Wesam Hassan (LSE) and Anthony Pickles (University of Birmingham), where it utilises Wesam’s work economic anthropology, digital finance, and gambling, with a focus on how people navigate risk and uncertainty in contexts of economic instability. The project aims to synthesise evidence across disciplines to support evidence-informed regulation and shape future research on gambling harms in an increasingly digital economy. It is a six-month Rapid Evidence Review, ( January- July 2026), funded through the UKRI Research Programme on Gambling Harms, examines what is currently known about the relationship between cryptocurrency and gambling, where the evidence remains uneven or underdeveloped, and what this means for future policy and research. The project is designed to be collaborative and the research team is deliberately interdisciplinary. Alongside two anthropologist, it includes one economist and two data scientists, allowing the review to combine qualitative insights with systematic evidence mapping and computational analysis. This approach makes it possible to examine not only how people experience and understand cryptocurrency and risk, but also how platforms are designed, how gambling-like features circulate across digital environments, and where existing research and regulatory frameworks fall short. 

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

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

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. 

This project has been conducted with the support of research counterparts Drs Zamzami A Karim and Dr Endri Sanopaka at STISIPOL Raja Haji Tanjungpinang, and with approval of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN).

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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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