Section: Staff Profiles
Jamie Cross
- Name
- Dr Jamie Cross
- Title
- Lecturer in Anthropology and Development; Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2011-2014)
- Organisation
- Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh - Address
- 1.05 58 George Square Edinburgh UK EH8 9LD
- Telephone
- Office: +44(0)1316515181 Mobile: +44(0)7552817310
- jamie.cross@ed.ac.uk
- URL
- http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/staff/cross_jamie
Academic Profile
Jamie Cross is a social anthropologist whose research and teaching combine interests in the political economy of international development, South Asian economy and society, and the social study of science and technology. He is currently leading a research project into the creation of new markets for solar powered light in rural India, sponsored by the UK's Leverhulme Trust, and is completing a book about dreams, desire and industrialisation based on over five years of fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, south India. He has carried out field based research projects in India, Nepal and Papua New Guinea and his ethnographic writing has engaged academic debates in anthropology, geography and development studies as well as audiences of policy makers, practitioners and activists. His research has been sponsored by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Royal Anthropological Institute, among others, and he has worked for the International Labour Organisation and the Dutch Centre for Research on Multinationals.
Current Research
Sponsored by a 3-year Early Career Fellowship from the UK's Leverhulme Trust (2011-2014) Jamie is currently working on a research project that explores the kinds of relationships being built into and shaped by the sale of low-cost, solar powered lighting systems to people who live without reliable access to mains electricity. Through ethnographic fieldwork with solar entrepreneurs, designers, technicians and communities of users in Uttar Pradesh and Orissa this project examines the kinds of knowledge practices and social infrastructures involved in creating markets for solar photovoltaics amongst people living in contexts of global poverty. With the support of the ESRC-EPSRC Interdisciplinary Network on Energy, Equity and Vulnerability this work has been extended to explore issues of labour and environmental justice in the global supply chains and across the life cycle of photovoltaic solar cells.
Jamie blogs about this research at, The Solar Assemblage.
As a co-founder of the Centre for New Economies of Development this research critically engages with the role of corporations as agents of development and with contemporary models of social business at the 'bottom of the pyramid'.
A second strand of research has explored the economies of hope and aspiration created by India's Special Economic Zones during the 2000s, when they became that country's most controversial sites of planning, investment and industrialisation. Through fieldwork inside a large offshore manufacturing unit and in the villages and highway townships of north coastal Andhra Pradesh this work asks how imagined and anticipated futures shaped spaces of global capital.
Current Research Students
Stewart Allen, "Barefoot Technologies: An Ethnographic Study of Learning and Skill Development in Rajasthan, India"
Heid Jerstad, "Causing the Weather: Anthropological Approaches to Climate and Culture in Himalayan India"
Gianluca Iazzolino, "Taking Money: The Integration of Mobile Banking within Somaliland's Monetary Ecosystem"
Publications
For open access links to all publications click on PDF below or go to www.academia.edu
Journal articles
2012 'Sweatshop Exchanges: Gifts and Giving in the Global Factory' Research in Economic Anthropology 32, 3-26. [PDF]
2012. ˜Technological Intimacy: Re-engaging with Gender and Technology in the Global Factory in Ethnography 13:2, 119-143. [PDF]
2011. Detachment as a Corporate Ethic: Materializing CSR in the diamond supply chain' in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60, 34-46 [PDF]
2010. Neoliberalism as Unexceptional: Economic Zones and the Everyday Precariousness of Working Life in South India in Critique of Anthropology 30:4, 355-373. [PDF]
2010. co-authored with Hayley MacGregor, Knowledge, Legitimacy and Economic Practice in Informal Markets for Medicine, Social Science and Medicine 71: 9, 1537-1702. [PDF]
2010. 'Occupational Health, Risk and Science in India's Global Factories' in South Asian History and Culture, 1:2, 224-238 [PDF]
2009. From Dreams to Discontent: Educated Men and the Everyday Politics of Labour in a Special Economic Zone in South India in Contributions to Indian Sociology 43:3, 351-79. [PDF]
2009. co-authored with Alice Street, Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid, in Anthropology Today 25:4, 4-9. [PDF]
2003. Anthropology and the Anarchists: Culture, Power, and Practice in Militant Anti-Capitalist Protests in Theomai 7.
Book Chapters
2013. 'Motivating Madhu: India's SEZs and the Spirit of Enterprise' in Nandini Gooptu (ed) Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India. London: Routledge
2010. Three Miles from Anarchy: Managerial Fear and the Affective Factory in Fear: Sarai Reader 08, Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. [PDF]
2010. Occupational Health, Risk and Science in India's Global Factories in Assa Doron and Alex Broom (eds.) Health, Culture and Religion in South Asia: Critical Social Science Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Book Reviews
2011. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S.) 17,2: 405-406
2011. Mobile work, mobile lives: cultural accounts of lived experiences in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S) 17: 178-222
2010. Stuff in Anthropological Notebooks, Journal of the Slovenian Anthropological Society.
2009. Struggles for an Alternative Globalisation: An Ethnography of Counter-Power in Southern France in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S) 15.
2009. Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 in the Journal of South Asian Development 4:2.
Other Publications
2010. Cross, J., Van der Wal, S. & de Haan, E. Rough Cut: The Global Trade in Non-Diamond Gemstones. Amsterdam: Centre for Research on Multinationals (SOMO)
2009. Who Are Informal Health Provider's and What Do They Do? Perspectives from Medical Anthropology, co-authored with Hayley MacGregor. Institute for Development Studies Working Paper No. 334.
This page was published on 15 May 2013