Recent Research Projects

Solid fluids in the Anthropocene: A transdisciplinary Inquiry into the archaeological anthropology of materials (2015-19)

Funded by the British Academy under its International Partnership and Mobility Scheme, this project responded to calls to rethink the relationship between human and earth sciences, by launching a new dialogue between archaeology and anthropology. Our focus was on ice and concrete, two key materials that combine properties of solidity and fluidity. Traditionally placed at opposite ends of history, both are caught in ongoing histories of environmental change. Combining literature review, fieldwork, experiments, workshops and training events, the project brought together anthropologists and archaeologists in Scotland with expertise in the study of the circumpolar North, and in Chile, a country is rich in glaciers and in which modern development underpinned by concrete infrastructures faces chronic seismic instability. Outcomes of the project included a special issue, entitled Solid Fluids, of the journal Theory, Culture and Society.

Knowing From the Inside: Antropology, Art, Architecture and Design (2013-18)

This major project, funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, aimed to reconfigure the relation between the practice of academic inquiry in the human sciences and the knowledge to which it gives rise. Conventional research protocols expect the scholar to treat the world as reserve from which to draw empirical material for subsequent interpretation in light of appropriate theory. Against this, we set out to trial an alternative procedure whereby theory is not applied after the fact, to a corpus of material already gathered, but rather grows from our direct, practical and observational engagements with the stuff of the dwelt-in world. Our method was distinguished by observation and experiment, the outcomes of which were not just written texts but works of art or craft, performances and installations. The project contributed to both education and design for sustainable living through a renewed emphasis on the improvisational creativity and perceptual acuity of practitioners. Outcomes included the books Correspondences (2017, 2020) and Imagining for Real (2022), as well as the edited volume Knowing From the Inside (2022).

Bringing things back to life: creative entanglements in a world of materials (2011-2013)

Conventionally, creating things has been understood as imposing form onto matter. Funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, this project aimed to challenge this ‘hylomorphic’ model of creation and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to forces and materials. It set out to show that things are not reducible to objects; that they are generated within processes of life; that a focus on life-processes requires us to attend to flows of materials; that these flows are creative, and that creative practice unfolds along a meshwork of interwoven lines. The project resulted in a book, The Life of Lines (2015).

Listening to birds: an anthropological approach to bird sound (2007-2009)

This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, had two overriding aims. The first was to explore the role of sound in mediating relationships between humans and birds. We wanted to understand how bird sounds become important and meaningful to people, for example in their evocation of time, place or season. The second was to investigate how people become skilled at differentiating what they hear. How do people learn the skills of listening to, and identifying, bird sounds? This led us to inquire into the relation between vision and hearing, which is critical to what happens when we hear a bird. How does hearing a bird differ from seeing it? How does seeing influence what we hear and how we hear it? What is the relationship between a bird as an object and the sounds that it makes?

Explorations in the comparative anthropology of the line (2005-2008)

This project, funded by a Professorial Fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council, pursued the implications of treating the human being not as a self-contained entity but as growing along a way of life. Every such way is a line of some kind. Through a comparative and historical anthropology of the line, the research aimed to forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. As a work of intellectual synthesis, the study was library-based, spanning literatures in several disciplines within and beyond the social sciences. It led to two major books. Lines: A Brief History (2007) explored how, in the transition from the trace to the connector, the growing line was shorn of the movement that gave rise to it. Making (2013) examined the relations between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture as disciplinary paths along which environments are perceived, shaped and understood.

Culture from the ground: walking, movement and placemaking (2004-2006)

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, this project built on a previous study that focused specifically on recreational rambling and hillwalking in Scotland, and was designed to reveal the sociality of walking over a broader canvas. Through an ethnography of everyday pedestrian movements, we explored how walking binds time and place in people’s experience, relationships and life-histories.

Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the relations between perception, creativity and skill (2002-2005)

This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was undertaken in conjunction with the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee. The project combined approaches from fine art and anthropology to examine the relation between perception, creativity, innovation and skill, through an empirical study of the knowledge practices of fine art. The research also explored the potential of a practice-based approach to teaching and learning in both disciplines.