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UCL Anthropology is the world's leading centre for Material Culture studies. Through long-term fieldwork and ethnographic engagement, we explore how people make, exchange and consume objects. We explore how the material world is central to the constitution of what it means to be human and theorize the social effects of material culture.
Staff research interests include:
- Media and mediation, digital politics and postsocialism (Rik Adriaans)
- Theories of immateriality, the anthropology of architecture and extra-terrestrial ethnography (Victor Buchli)
- The history and theory of technology, Melanesian artefacts and epistemologies (Ludovic Coupaye)
- Design ethnography and听family photographs (Adam Drazin)
- Intellectual and cultural property, new digital objects and听contemporary museum practices (Haidy Geismar)
- Infrastructure,听climate change and the 'anthropocene' and digital data and expertise (Hannah Knox)
- Fabric, fashion and听society,听innovation and material translation and听art,听abstraction, modelling and image based polities in Oceania (Susanne K眉chler)
- Social networks and听the use of technology in hospices听(Danny Miller)
- Visual theory, visual cultures of South Asia, photography and the political imagination (Chris Pinney)
- Built environment and visual anthropology (Maria Salaru)
- Art and the public sphere and听iconoclashes (Rafael Schacter)
- Data and algorithms, knowledge infrastructures and techno-science (Tone听Walford)
The Material Culture section founded and continues to edit the 听and the . We convene a weekly public seminar in Material, Visual and Digital Culture and run a number of reading and research groups.