Department Member, Anthropology
About
I have research and teaching interests in the anthropology of learning, work, apprenticeship, craf and material culture, with a regional focus on China and Taiwan. I obtained my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2007.
My doctoral research aimed at understanding the consequences of China's modernisation projects – collectivisation and industrialisation in the 1950s, and privatisation as of the 1980s – on the nation's crafts, and on modes of apprenticeship and transmission of craft-related knowledge. This involved fieldwork among ceramic artisans in the Jiangsu Province, and a period of apprenticeship undertaken as field research method.
I have since conducted fieldwork in Taiwan's main centre of ceramics production, with the aim to understand the consequences of industrial competition from China, and transformation of the ceramics industry emphasising craft tradition and heritage.
Pursuing my interests in the relationship between knowledge practices and heritage, I have conducted research on the practice of conservation of 'heirloom' crops in Norway during a research stay at the University of Oslo in 2010-11.
In addition to several publications, the research on ceramics in China led to the setting up of the exhibition "A perfectionist craft? Precision and spontaneity in the zisha ceramics of China" at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (http://maa.cam.ac.uk/).
