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 (more info here). 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 Social Change’ 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.

From October 2010-June 2012 I have funding for a research project entitled Unsettling the State: Law, Engineering and Regional Government in Cusco, Peru. This is a collaborative project with Deborah Poole, an anthropologist working at Johns Hopkins University.

The project is funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation/AHRC.