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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 family photographs (Adam Drazin)
- Intellectual and cultural property, new digital objects and contemporary museum practices (Haidy Geismar)
- Infrastructure, climate change and the 'anthropocene' and digital data and expertise (Hannah Knox)
- Fabric, fashion and society, innovation and material translation and art, abstraction, modelling and image based polities in Oceania (Susanne Küchler)
- Social networks and the use of technology in hospices (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 iconoclashes (Rafael Schacter)
- Data and algorithms, knowledge infrastructures and techno-science (Tone Walford)
The Material Culture section founded and continues to edit the Journal of Material Culture and the Journal of Home Cultures. We convene a weekly public seminar in Material, Visual and Digital Culture and run a number of reading and research groups.