Palestine and the Middle East; human rights; nationalism; the United Nations; investigative commissions; political epistemologies; international law; anthropology of violence; political anthropology; historical anthropology
Richard Axelby is an anthropologist whose research interests span three interlinked areas: natural resource use; citizenship and identity, and the politics of development.
West Africa; material culture; cultural landscape; cultural memory; heritage; historicity; history of anthropology; colonialism; museum anthropology; exhibition practice; visual anthropology; migration and diaspora; culture and development.
East Africa. Corporations and capitalism, international development, moral economies, corporate social responsibility, enterprise and entrepreneurialism, inclusive markets, consumption and commodities, politics and practices of food governance, gender.
Japanese society, material culture, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural history
South Africa; economic anthropology; anthropology of the state & institutions, bureaucracy, agriculture; livelihoods; health; nutrition; politics of food systems, food acquisition and consumption practices.
Anthropology of religion, religious reform (Islam and Pentecostalism), transnational religious networks (Tabligh Jamaʻat), faith-based development, urban anthropology, popular culture, gender, youth, West Africa (the Gambia, Senegal and Nigeria)
Sociality, belonging, and exclusion across cultural domains and scales; social constitution of the self; intersubjectivity; kinship/relatedness; psychological states; anthropology of experience; language and thought; tourism; heritage. Europe; Jewish world; zones of tourism encounter; global flows and imaginaries.
Gender, Islam and modernity in the Middle East and Europe; Islamic feminism, secular and religious women’s movements in the Middle East, transnational migration and gender; multiculturalism and citizenship; Islam in Europe, globalization; disapora and refugee studies; the Palestine question.
Middle East with emphasis on the Arabian Peninsular (especially Yemen): elites, memory, religion and politics
West Africa: DR Congo; music and cultural patronage between Kinshasa and Europe, electoral politics, aesthetic and political-economic anthropology.
Nepal; shamanism and ritual practice; anthropological theory, past and present
His research interests include: East and Northeastern Africa; development, urbanisation, civil society, and ethnicity and nationalism.
South Asia - Nepal and urban India. politics of land, religious fundamentalism, post-colonialism. Gurkhas, Anglo-Indians.
South Asian rural and small town society, social and economic change
Lecturer and professor of African anthropology, SOAS 1964-1996; professor of social anthropology, University of Oxford 1996-2008, emeritus thereafter. Fieldwork in eastern Africa 1966-2002 for a number of years in total, among Luo, Giriama and Swahili-speakers, on Islam, entrepreneurship, political ethnicity, language, material culture, and medical anthropology.
Lecturer, Reader and Professor in SOAS 1967-2004; fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey; published on pastoral nomadism, ethnic and tribal minorities and the state, material cultures, culinary cultures, anthropology of Islam, Iranian Cinema.
Mukta Das completed a PhD in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS in 2018. Her research focused on South Asian food communities and networks in China's Pearl River Delta, particularly in Macau, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Her research explored notions of food belonging and identity and charted the transformations of these in the decades after the end of British and Portuguese colonialism in the region among South Asian food purveyors and how they had adapted to changing, immigrant-receiving Chinese realities.
South Asia; borders, roads and mobility, space and place, culture and politics, development, South Asia. Assistant Professor in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.
Urban anthropology; anthropology of insecurity; architecture; Islamic reform; blood donation; memory especially nostalgia; Indian Ocean; South Asian diasporas in East Africa.
Britain, South Asia; cultural dimensions of mental health across nations, suffering, marginalised populations in psychiatric care in London and Chennai, cultural identity of Dalit groups (formerly 'untouchable' caste) in India. Senior Clinical Lecturer, Research Department of Health Sciences, UCL.
Tom Selwyn is a Professorial Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the London Middle East Institute. He was awarded an Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Foundation in 2014. He is widely published in the field of the anthropology of tourism/pilgrimage with regional interests in Palestine/Israel and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He directed/co-directed four major research and development projects in Palestine and Bosnia-Herzegovina for the European Commission between 1995-2005; founded the MA in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage at SOAS in 2010; and was awarded the Lucy Mair medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2009. Recent publications include 'The Future of Palestinian Tourism' in Isaac,R., CM Hall, F. Higgins-Desbiolles (eds), 2016, Power and Politics of Tourism in Palestine, London, Routledge; 'Tourism and Sight Prevention' in Andrews, H.(ed) 2016, Tourism and Violence, London, Routledge; 'The Rise and Fall of Orientalism in Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage: Report from Palestine/Israel', Tourism, Culture, and Communication, 17, 2017.
In my current research, I ask the question ‘how can education help us deal with the Anthropocene’? I argue that environmental activism can be seen as a form of education, one that has a lot to offer to formal education systems around the globe. My broader research interests include international development, activism, ethnographic film, cinematic representations of progress, the history of South Asia and South Africa.
I am the author of the monograph 'Visions of Development' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and the upcoming book 'Educating for the Anthropocene’ as well as a number of articles and studies that can be accessed through here.
Taiwan. Anthropology of education. Faith communities in Britain.
Conflict and conviviality, belonging and exclusion, indigenous and immigrant narratives of statehood in post-colonial, multi-ethnic spaces. Anthropology of coups. Ethnography of Parliament. Fiji (also Myanmar and Ethiopia).
