University of St Andrews

Dr Adam Reed

Senior Lecturer

Profile

I conducted my original research in a prison just outside Port Moresby, the national capital of Papua New Guinea. That work focuses on issues around cultures of incarceration, including attention to colonial & postcolonial governmentality, the politics of vision, money, aesthetics of documents,articulations of loss and exile and popular narratives of nationhood, the city and crime. More recently, I have conducted research in the UK, working with members of a British literary society as well as with various groups of London knowledge producers (walking tour guides, Internet journal keepers). Out of these projects come my interests in popular theorizations of the city and urban imaginations, cultures of fiction reading, senses of place, the material culture of books, memory, mind and literary subjectivities. My new and current fieldwork project looks at animal welfare and ethical self-fashioning in Scotland.

See also the PURE research profile.

Academic qualifications

BA Hons, MA [Otago], PhD [Cambridge]

Selected publications

2011. ‘Inspiring Strathern'. In Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration & Social Science. [eds.] Edwards, J & Petrovic-Steger, M. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

2011. 'Hope on remand', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17, 3, 527-544

2011. 'Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: a study of Henry Williamson Society, Manchester University Press & University of Toronto.

2011. 'Number-One Enemy: Police, Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison', Oceania 81: 22-35.

2008. 'Blog This: surfing the metropolis and the method of London'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 391-406.

2006. "Smuk is king": the action of cigarettes in a Papua New Guinea prison'. In Thinking Through Things: theorising artefacts in ethnographic perspective. Henare, A., Holbraad, M. & Wastell, S. (eds.). Routledge.

2006. 'Documents Unfolding.' In: Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Riles, A. (ed.). The University of Michigan Press.

2005. “My blog is me”: texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)'. Ethnos 70 (2).

2004. 'Expanding “Henry”: fiction reading and its artifacts in a British literary society'. American Ethnologist 31 (1).

2003: Papua New Guinea's 'last place': experiences of constraint in a postcolonial prison. Berghahn Books: Oxford.

2002. 'Henry and I: an ethnographic account of men's fiction reading'. Ethnos, 67 (2).

2002. 'City of details: interpreting the personality of London'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8 (1).

1999. 'Anticipating Individuals. Modes of Vision and their Social Consequence in a Papua New Guinean Prison'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5 (1).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research interests

Continuing fieldwork on ethnography of London: working with different groups of people with an identified interest in claiming to know the city and communicate that knowledge to others [i.e. walking tour guides, webloggers].

Continuing fieldwork with British literary society: developing interest in anthropological approaches to study of literature and literary cultures and ethnography of fiction reading and writing.

Beginning archival project on history of anthropology, with particular focus on the ethnography of fieldwork: how anthropologists have conceived the experience of research, the technologies and material culture of fieldwork and modes of knowing.

 

Research students

Susan Eldred, Anthony Pickles, Robin Irvine, Sandra Fernandez, Kirsty Ferrier and Katharina Krimmer

Teaching

SA3506: Methods in Social Anthropology

Urban anthropology, anthropology of Melanesia, anthropology and literature, ethnography of fieldwork [history of anthropology], anthropology of Britain

---

<- back to staff list