School of Social and Political Science

Background

I grew up in Ilford and then came to Edinburgh to study Social Anthropology at undergraduate, MSc, and PhD levels. After my PhD, I worked in Design Informatics at Edinburgh and then was a postdoctoral research fellow at Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I spent a year teaching at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, went on maternity leave for a bit, then returned to Edinburgh as a postdoc on Prof. Janet Carsten's project A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage and then as a lecturer.

My main interest is in the anthropology of relationships ('kinship studies'- which includes topics such as family and friendship, feminist approaches to power and politics, gender, sexuality, reproduction, and the economic consequences of these aspects of life). I am interested in how people describe so-called intimate aspects of life in relation to global, national, and local histories and politics.

I have carried out fieldwork in Poland (on fur clothing, small businesses, aesthetics, entrepreneurship, gender, class, and intergenerational relationships), the UK (on charity shops and ideas about secondhand objects), and in the US (on legal and political change surrounding marriage- and on experiences of being married, divorced, widowed, single, and so on). I am currently finishing a book about marriage in the US.

An additional interest concerns how people discuss or stay silent about difficult histories. I wrote about this in a journal article about US graphic novels (focussing on Roz Chast's Can't we talk about something more pleasant? and Bruce Eric Kaplan's I was a child). I'm now thinking about the popularity of children's book series such as Little People, Big Dreams, which give biographical accounts of famous people's lives. How, in particular, do these books tell children in an 'age-appropriate' manner about contexts of their subjects' lives when these include state violence, racism, homophobia, religious discrimination, and so on? What does this tell us about what adults think children understand?

I am also beginning two new projects: one on philanthropic cultures, bequests, and naming and mourning practices in UK and US higher education; the other on sun protection in Scotland.

Teaching

At the moment (2024-25 academic year), I'm teaching on these courses:

• Anthropology of Sex and Reproduction (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught (MSc))

  This course, which I'm teaching with Lucy Lowe, addresses the multiple biological, political, ethical, material, and religious ways in which people engage with gender, sexuality, kinship, and bodies. The lectures I'm giving this year focus on celibacy, sex under capitalism, sexual violence, sex education, and research methods and ethics in sex and reproduction research.

• Kinship: Structure and Process (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught (MSc))

  Resto Cruz and I lead seminars on why people care about relationships, and why these relationships matter politically. My lectures have addressed this through topics including queer kinship, parenting, and kinship and memory. Resto and I also coordinate the Kinship Hub, through which students and faculty hear about visiting speakers' research, watch films, and write together.

I've also recently taught on these courses:

• Consumption, Exchange, and Technology: The Anthropology of Economic Processes (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught (MSc))
• Ethnographies of the US (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught (MSc))
• Introduction to Social Anthropology (Undergraduate)
• Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course (Undergraduate)
• Every year, I supervise undergraduate and postgraduate taught (MSc) dissertations. Students choose their own topics and I meet with them one-to-one to help them plan their research and write up their findings. Recent projects include marriages between citizens of China and citizens of Japan, post-stroke aphasia, inclusive sex education, and intimacy AI. 

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Publications

Books

2021. Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense (edited with Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Eirini Papadaki, and Korean Reece. UCL Press.

2019. Material culture and kinship in Poland: An ethnography of fur and society. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Selected articles and book chapters

2022  Invited comment on Heslop’s ‘From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings’. Current Anthropology, Vol. 63, Number 4.

2021 '‘You can learn to do it right, or you can learn to do it wrong’: marriage counselling, togetherness and creative conservatism in Lynchburg, Virginia’' In, Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Siobhan Magee, Eirini Papadaki, and Koreen Reece (eds.). Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense.

2019 'Drawing the adult child: US graphic memoir and the anthropologies of kinship and personhood'. Anthropology and Humanism. Volume 44, issue 1, pages 88-111.

2019 '"To be one’s own boss": Exceptional entrepreneurs and products that sell themselves in urban Poland’. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology special issue ‘The Anthropology of Selling’.

2019 'Talking about kinship', with Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Eirini Papadaki, and Koreen Reece. Anthropology of this Century, issue 25.

2017 'Catholic in Kraków? Fur, the ethic of attribution, and when non-religious things conform to religious aesthetics'. World Art special issue ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives’. Vol. 7, issue 2, pages 307-327.

2016 ‘An “excess of the normal”: luxury and difference in Polish fur critique.’ Journal of Material Culture. Vol 21. 1ssue 3, pages 277 – 295.

2015 ‘Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and inheritance in a southern Polish city’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 21, issue 1, pages 66-85.

*Discussed on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, 25 March 2015.

Book Reviews and criticism

2022  ‘Agnieszka Kościańska’s To See a Moose: The History of Polish Sex Education’. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. 

2021  ‘Kate Strasdin’s Inside the royal wardrobe: a dress history of Queen Alexandra’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 26, Issue 1, pages 908.

2019 'Go to the waves', on Laura Watts' Energy at the end of the world: An Orkney Islands saga. Times Literary Supplement, July 2.

2018 'Not your milk...', on Kathryn Gillespie's The cow with ear tag #1389 and Michael Taussig's Palma Africana. Times Literary Supplement, November 27.

2018 'The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, 2017). Created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood'. Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online, 7: 44-46.

2017 ‘Agnieszka Pasieka’s Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 23, Issue 1, pages 213-214.

2015 ‘Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith (eds.) Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice’. Journal of Design History Vol. 28, Issue 4, pages 453-455.

2015 ‘Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds.) Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 21, Issue 3, pages 691–692.

2015 ‘Tansy E. Hoskins’ Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion’. Allegra Laboratory. Published online 11/02/15.

2015 ‘Jessica Choate Robbins’ “Personhood in Places: Aging, Memory, and Relatedness in Postsocialist Poland”’. Dissertation Reviews, No. 11135.

2014 ‘Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth and Greg Hearn's Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions’. The LSE Review of Books. Published online 18/11/14.

2014 ‘Kaori O’Connor’s The English Breakfast: The Biography of a National Meal’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 20, issue 4, pages 794–795.

2014 ‘Karen Tranberg Hansen and D. Soyini Madison (eds.) African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 20, issue 4, pages 786–787.

2014 ‘Helen Jefferson Lenskyj’s Sexual Diversity and the Sochi 2014 Olympics: No More Rainbows’. The LSE Review of Books. Published online 14/10/14. *Reposted on the Democratic Audit Blog 26/10/14, www.democraticaudit.com/p=8836

2013 ‘Erica L. Tucker’s Remembering Occupied Warsaw’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 19, issue 2, pages 421–422.