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Jamie Cross

Follow my research on Twitter and Academia

 

Background  

I joined the Social Anthropology faculty in 2011 following teaching and research positions at Goldsmiths College, the National University of Ireland, and Cornell University. I have a PhD in anthropology from the University of Sussex (2008).  

   

Markets, Energy and Development 

 

I am currently involved in two research projects that explore the material politics of low carbon energy technologies.

First, with the support of a 3 year Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2011-2014), I am exploring the kinds of relationships being built into and shaped by the sale of low-cost, solar powered lighting systems to people living without access to mains electricity. Through ethnographic fieldwork with solar entrepreneurs, designers, technicians and communities of users in India, Nepal and Papua New Guinea 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.  

Second, with the support of a small grant from the ESRC-EPSRC Interdisciplinary Network on Energy, Equity and Vulnerability, I am exploring issues of labour and environmental justice in the supply chains and across the life cycle of the photovoltaic solar cell.

I have begun to post problems and ideas that stem from this research online in a blog, The Solar Assemblage. 

Neoliberalism, Development and Industrialisation

  

My earlier doctoral and post-doctoral research projects 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 my research asked what kinds of dreams are being channelled into and shaped by these spaces of market freedom and planned development.

This research has resulted in a number of publications on education, technology, gender, exchange and informality.

I am currently completing a book, provisionally entitled "Futures of Neoliberalism: Hope, Capitalism and the Making of India's Economic Zones", that uses this ethnography to ask how imagined and anticipated futures shape spaces of global capital.

 

Supervision

I am interested in supervising research projects in the anthropology of development - particularly those that are engaged with the energy and climate change, work, labour and industrialisation - in the anthropology of science, technology and material culture, and projects that are engaged with 'alter-globalisation' or 'anti-capitalist' movements.

Current PhD topics I am supervising include:

Stewart Allen, "Barefoot Technologies: An Ethnographic Study of Learning and Skill Development in Rajasthan, India"

 

Publications

Open access links to my publications can be found below or on academia.edu  

Journal articles 

2012 (Forthcoming) 'Sweatshop Exchanges: Gifts and Giving in the Global Factory' Research in Economic Anthropology 32 

2012. ‘Technological Intimacy: Re-engaging with Gender and Technology in the Global Factory’ in Ethnography 13:2, 119-143. (Published online first September 2011) [PDF]

2011. 'Detachment as a Corporate Ethic: Materializing CSR in the diamond supply chain' in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60. [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

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 Providers’ 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 8 May 2012