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

Cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, creolization, common-sense, comedy, adventure, ethics, aesthetics, epoché, existential anthropology. Area specialities: Jamaica, the Caribbean.

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 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

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

 

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