Professor David Mosse conferred a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
17 February 2021
David Mosse, Professor of Social Anthropology has been conferred a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
David Mosse is Professor of Social Anthropology. He studied social anthropology at Oxford University from where he received a DPhil. He has published extensively on the anthropology of religion, environment and development and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has worked for Oxfam as Representative for South India, and for other international development agencies as a social development adviser. He joined SOAS in 1997.
His research spans interests in the anthropology of development and activism, environmental history and natural resources management, the anthropology of Christianity, South Asian society and popular religion, and the anthropology of mental health and cultural psychiatry. He is part of a collaborative ESRC research project titled ‘Caste Out of Development: Civil Society Activism and Transnational Advocacy on Dalit Rights and Development’ examining the continuing significance of caste in the modern market economy and in contemporary development encounters and contentions in India, as well as caste and anti-discrimination law in the UK.
His most recent research interest is in the anthropology of mental life, distress and survival, and in mental healthcare systems, therapeutic practices and public policy in the UK and South Asia. This includes ethnographic and public engagement in approaches to psychiatric crisis and suicide prevention across cultures. These interests are combined in teaching BA and MA courses on South Asian ethnography, the anthropology of development and undergraduate and postgraduate modules on ‘mind, culture and psychiatry’.
He recently received funding from The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a three-year collaborative research project , Transformation in Mental Healthcare: An Anthropological Study of Open Dialogue.
Professor Mosse joins 36 other leading UK social scientists to be conferred the award of Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. New Fellows are recognised, after an independent peer review process, for the excellence and impact of their work and their wider contributions to the social sciences for public benefit.
About the Academy of Social Sciences
The Academy of Social Sciences is the national academy of academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences. Its mission is to promote social science in the United Kingdom for public benefit. The Academy is composed of approximately 1400 individual Fellows, 46 Member Learned Societies, and a number of affiliates. Together, this body of organisations is a community of some 90,000 social scientists. Academy Fellows are leading professional social scientists from academia and the public and private sectors.