Andrew Irving

Biography

Regional specialisations East Africa (inc Kampala, Uganda) and New York City.

Topical interests Death; Illness and Medical Anthropology; HIV/AIDS; Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception; The Anthropology of Time; Art, Performance and Aesthetics; Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology; Urban Anthropology and Spatial Perception.

Current Research

New York City:   I have recently been working on an experimental art/anthropology research project supported by a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation and the ESRC entitled "New York Stories". The aim of "New York Stories" is to research and represent how different modes of inner expression--including interior dialogues, unarticulated moods, imaginative lifeworlds and emotional reverie--constitute peoples lived experience of urban life and mediate social-cultural spaces but remain hidden beneath the surface of public activities.

Africa : I am currently developing British Academy and methods@manchester funded research project in Kampala, Uganda under the collective theme of Rethinking Media/Reclaiming Personhood. The aim is to consider how socially marginalised persons who through death, disease or other dislocating experiences can re-establish social and existential continuity and become included in community and society through different kinds of media practices. The projects use visual and other sensory media and collaborative forms of self-representation to address questions of research, representation, ethics and empowerment and set up a different kind of social life.

PhD supervision I welcome PhD projects across a broad range of anthropological themes, especially those that place special emphasis on the following areas: Death; Illness and Medical Anthropology; HIV/AIDS; Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception; The Anthropology of Time; Art, Performance and Aesthetics; Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology; Urban Anthropology.

PHD RESEARCH STUDENTS

Current (1st Supervisor)

Rosa Sansone: The Social Formation of the Mediterranean Sea: An Ethnographic Perspective on Movement and Perception across Lampedusian Waters

Lana Askari: Homemaking: Return dynamics of Kurdish diaspora

Paloma Yanez Serrano: Sensorial Experiences of the Agro City: The case of Spain’s “Plastic Sea”


Lee Gallagher: The Journey Back Home: Processes of Recovery and Disjuncture in Traumatic Brain Injury 

Current (2nd supervisor)

Angelica Cabezas Pino: Audiovisual Strategies to overcome stigma among men with HIV in Chile (co-supervised with Drama)

Jose Farjado Escoffie: A journey with the native potato: from local knowledge to luxury consumption

Veronica Castro: Santo Daime (co-supervised with Drama)

Kriston Jackson: Everyday Aesthetics on the Vernacular American Roadside (co-supervised with Drama)

Completed (1st Supervisor)

2017 JongMin Jeong: Healing the brain through sensory stimulation and activities

2017   Alessandra D’Onofrio Imaginary Tales from either Shore: undocumented Egyptian migrants in Milan (co-supervised with Drama)

2017   Shotaro Wake: Empathy and stigma: their consequences for cancer survivors

2016   Ximin Zhou: Between Promises and Uncertainty: An Anthropological Study of Roads

2016    Paola Garnica: Visual perception and urban life: Mexico City

2015    Ruth Gibbons: I_t''s all of these Puzzle Pieces: The representation and the manifest _discourse of dyslexic experience.

2015    Martha Dietrich-Ortega: Sensing prison: the bodily and imaginative aspects of imprisonment among female prisoners in Peru

2014    Camilla Morelli: Movement, Materiality and Imagination: world-making and knowing amongst Matses children of Amazonian Peru

2013    Carolina Corral: Indefinite Sentence. The enduring presence of imprisonment in the lives of former inmates in Mexico

2013    Giovanni Spissu: The People of Long Street, Cape Town

2012   Natalie Araujo: Sin dejar: the cosmopolitan negotiations of Colombian migrants in London

2011    Penny Moore: Living a Musical Life: Musicians, Music-Making and the Creation of Space in Vienna

2010    Alyssa Grossman: Choreographies of Memory: everyday sites and practices of remembrance work in post-socialist, EU accession-era Bucharest

Completed (2nd Supervisor)

2017   Karen Waltorp: Mirror Images The smartphone as relational device and real virtuality among young Muslim women in Copenhagen

2015    Placido Munoz Moran: Street art, cultural identity and public space in Barcelona

2015    Rachael Gore: Rhythmic horizons: mapping sound in London

2014    Michael Atkins: Looking for business: social and visual ambiguity of men that sell sex on the street

2013    Andrea Gasper: Conceptions of the visual in the contemporary design world: an ethnography in a design studio in Milan.