Professor Penny Harvey (Theme 4 Convenor)
Research interests
I work ethnographically and use ethnography to think about relational knowledge practices, about process, complexity and specificity. I have carried out research in the Andean Region and in the Peruvian Amazon, in Spain and in the U.K. My main interests are in the following general fields of enquiry:
- the anthropology of science and technology particularly in relation to design, engineering and construction practices
- ethnographic approaches to state formation and neo-liberal regulation
- environmental controversies
- the politics of communication broadly conceived to includes language practice, information technologies, community radio, digital visualisation, and art and exhibition practice.
I am currently working with Hannah Knox on an ethnography of roads in the Andean and Amazonian regions of Peru (www.cresc.ac.uk/peru/). We are writing a book in which we track the material, moral and social controversies produced by a volatile mix of engineering expertise, transnational capital and territorial politics. We are particularly interested in how road construction projects mobilise spatial and temporal imaginaries. Roads are field sites that allow for the empirical study of trans-local places that register histories of travel and of settlement, and that draw together the preoccupations and speculative investments of multilateral funders, international trade and local enterprises.
Within CRESC I am co-ordinating the research theme on ‘Topologies of Cultural Change’ (www.cresc.ac.uk) in which an inter-disciplinary group is looking at a range of themes which address questions concerning the politics of space and matter in three broad areas (i) mobilising matter and engineering social change (ii) edges moral borders, visceral boundaries and (iii) mediation, affect and presence.
Recent publication
- 2010 (edited with J. Edwards and P. Wade), Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
- 2010 “Cementing Relations: the materiality of roads and public spaces in provincial Peru”, Social Analysis 54:1 special issue on "Cultures of Control: The State, Society and the Aesthetics of Power"
- 2010 (with Hannah Knox) ‘Delivering Social Change: An anthropological approach to the ethnography of place’ in A. Dale and J. Mason (eds) Social Researching: new perspectives on methods, London: Sage.
- 2010 (with Soumhya Venkatesan) ‘Faith, Reason and the Ethic of Craftsmanship: creating contingently stable worlds’ in M. Candea (ed) The Social After Gabriel Tarde: debates and assessments, London: Routledge.
- 2010 (with Hannah Knox) ‘Abstraction, Materiality and the “Science of the Concrete” in Engineering Practice’ in T. Bennett and P. Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, London: Routledge
- 2009 “Between Narrative and Number: The Case of ARUP’s 3D Digital City Model”, in Cultural Sociology, volume 3(2) 257-276.
- 2008 (with H. Knox) “Otherwise Engaged”: Culture, Deviance and the Quest for Connectivity through Road Construction, in Journal of Cultural Economy (vol 1, no.1 79-92).
- 2008 ‘Relaciones Experimentales: la antropologia y la ciencia imprecisa de la ingenieria’ in Retos Teoricos y Nuevas Practicas, Donostia: ANKULEKI
- 2007 (edited with J. Edwards and P. Wade), Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice, Oxford: Berg, 208pp.
- 2007 Sociological Review. Guest edited section on ‘Expertise, Technology and
- Public Culture’ with introduction (Harvey) to three papers (Knox, Sykes and Bolton).
- 2007 ‘Arresting Mobility or Locating Expertise: “Globalisation” and the “Knowledge Society”’ in M. Lien and M. Melhuus (eds) Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging, Berghahn Books.
- 2006 (with H. Knox and M. Savage) ‘Social networks and the study of relations: networks as method, metaphor and form’, Economy and Society 35.1, pp113-140.
- 2005 ‘The Materiality of State Effects: An ethnography of a road in the Peruvian Andes’ in C. Krohn-Hansen and K. Nustad (eds) , State Formation. Anthropological Explorations, Cambridge: Pluto Press, 216-247.
Contact Details
Social Anthropology
School of Social Science
Arthur Lewis Building
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
UK
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 0572
email: penny.harvey@manchester.ac.uk