Ivan Deschenaux is a Research Officer in the Department of Methodology. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Anthropology, LSE, in 2019. Prior to his current position, he was an LSE Fellow in the Department of Methodology, and prior to that, a class teacher for LSE100. He is currently a member of the rep²si research project.

Research interests

Ivan is a social anthropologist with a strong interdisciplinary outlook. His research focuses on social norms, how they change over time, and what makes people follow or violate them. He also studies the micro-dynamics of social inequality, with a view to understanding how the latter is reproduced through everyday interactions. His regional focus is on Nepal, where he completed 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork for his PhD and is conducting another year of fieldwork in 2024–2025. His primary interests are caste and caste-based discrimination, the link between caste and inequality, and how social norms surrounding caste are changing. Ivan is a firm believer in mixed-methods research. He uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches in his own work, combining ethnographic observation, social network analysis, and experimental approaches.