Dr Huon Wardle

Senior Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2982

Email

hobw@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

Room 5

Location

71 North Street

Office hours

On research leave

 

Research areas

My work has centred on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics with an ethnographic focus on the Caribbean and its 'creolizing' social-cultural processes. I have more than thirty years’ experience conducting and supervising research on the Caribbean region. Writing has moved between an ethnographic (empirical-analytical) strand and an anthropological (conceptual-epistemological) one. The search has been for a conceptual toolkit with which to make sense of everday experience in a cosmopolitanizing--often dissonant, jumbled and confused, but also potentially liberating--world society. A pivotal concept has become 'common-sense' as a human universal.

My enduring interest as an anthropologist has been in individuals and how we make a meaningful world, finding freedoms for ourselves; how we transcend cultural categories and relational constraints through creative narrations of experience. This approach is guided by the idea that 'the personal is cosmopolitical' (Wardle and Shaffner 2017:5). It has led me to reenvision the practices that make up a cosmopolitan view, including openness or hospitality toward the ‘foreign’, empathy across categorical boundaries, utopian imagining and the idea of the transcendence of immediate or ‘temporal’ constraints.

I am the author/editor of ten volumes, most recently Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method in conversation with Nigel Rapport, and more than seventy academic papers and other interventions. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, in 2023, I published 人类学家如何写作: 民族志阅读指南, or How Anthropologists Write, with Shanghai Normal University Press. I was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J.B. Donne Prize in 2014.

Positions held at the University of St Andrews:
Head of the Department of Social Anthropology, 2018—2021
Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, 2015—2018
Director of the Centre for Amerindian, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, 2010—2013

Current research activity:

During the spring semester 2025-2026 I have been invited to participate in the work of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

PhD supervision

• Shanay Cowan
• Cristian Erazo Romero
• Josephine Mullen
• Dillys Daniela Del Rosario Rodríguez Neira
• Lewis Smith
• Hector Trujillo
• Yichi Zhang

Selected publications

• Open access

  Magic, self and (world) society: groundwork for an existential and cosmopolitan anthropology

  Wardle, H., 2 Jan 2024, In: Anthropological Forum. 34, 1, p. 33-51 19 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science Introduction

  Wardle, H., 29 Nov 2024, Routledge International Handbook Of Existential Human Science. Wardle, H., Rapport, N. & Piette, A. (eds.). p. 9-11 3 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Foreword/postscript

• Afterword

  Rapport, N. J. & Wardle, H., 17 Nov 2023, Cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan method. Wardle, H. & Rapport, N. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 187-195 9 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Anthropology as an existential enquiry

  Wardle, H., 1 Aug 2023, Routledge international handbook of existential human science. Wardle, H., Rapport, N. & Piette, A. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 36-49 14 p. (Routledge international handbooks).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan method

  Wardle, H. (Editor) & Rapport, N. J. (Editor), 17 Nov 2023, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 198 p. (Routledge studies in anthropology)

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• General introduction: The Routledge handbook of existential human science

  Wardle, H., Piette, A. & Rapport, N., 1 Aug 2023, Routledge international handbook of existential human science. Wardle, H., Rapport, N. & Piette, A. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 1-6 6 p. (Routledge international handbooks).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Foreword/postscript

• Hart, Keith. Self in the world: connecting life's extremes

  Wardle, H., 1 Mar 2023, In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 29, 1, p. 214-215 2 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review

• On the structure of cosmopolitan encounters

  Wardle, H., 17 Nov 2023, Cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan method. Wardle, H. & Rapport, N. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 177-186 10 p. (Routledge studies in anthropology).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Routledge international handbook of existential human science

  Wardle, H. (Editor), Rapport, N. (Editor) & Piette, A. (Editor), 1 Aug 2023, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 304 p. (Routledge international handbooks)

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Section I: introduction

  Wardle, H., 1 Aug 2023, Routledge international handbook of existential human science. Wardle, H., Rapport, N. & Piette, A. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 9-11 3 p. (Routledge international handbooks).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

 

See more publications