Tatiana Thieme

Tatiana Thieme graduated from Cornell University (New York, USA) with a BA in Anthropology and Dance (2000), where she was awarded a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts. She completed an MSc in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics (2004), and an MPhil/PhD in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. She was an Honorary Cambridge European Trust Scholar (2008) and her PhD was funded by an ESRC Case Studentship (2013). She worked as a Lecturer in the Geography Department of the University of Cambridge and a Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College from 2013 to 2015. Tatiana joined UCL’s Geography Department in October 2015, where she was recently awarded a 2020 UCL Social and Historical Sciences Faculty Education Award for Academic support to students.

Since 2011, she has also been affiliated with Paris based Social Business/Enterprise and Poverty Chair at Haute Ecole de Commerce (HEC), and has been a visiting lecturer at Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) for their Masters modules on “Economie et Société”. She is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the Association of American Geographers, Association of American Anthropologists, British Institute of East Africa (BIEA), Institut Francais de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA), and the University of Cambridge African Research Forum. Tatiana is also passionate about the convergence of critical academic reflection and practice. She has worked as an academic advisor on numerous action research projects in Kenya, India, Philippines, and South Africa focused on improving access to urban sanitation, nutrition, and energy for the urban poor, and is a member of Paris-based think tank Re(Source), focused on tackling water, sanitation and energy poverty. She is also a contributing editor for Cityscapes Magazine.

Research At a broad level, my research interests engage with different aspects of entrepreneurial and makeshift urbanism. My recent research has focused on alternative cultural and economic geographies related to the politics of urban poverty, informal work, and everyday coping strategies in contexts of precarious urban environments. The three sub-themes of my research are: Urban political ecology of sanitation and waste; Youth geographies and "hustle" economies; social enterprise and development.

1. Urban Political Ecologies of Sanitation, Waste and Repair

My doctoral research involved ethnographic research conducted in Kenya, examining the informal waste economies in one of Nairobi's largest and oldest informal settlements. The research examined the effects of unplanned urbanization and economic liberalization on the generation of Kenyan youth raised in the "slums" and left to their own devices to make a living in the highly unregulated urban economy. The research also explored the narratives of "hustling" that features prominently amongst youth referring to their everyday waste work in informal settlements. The research also studied the actors (corporate, NGO, state) purporting to address the challenges of urban poverty through efforts reflecting assorted discourses of entrepreneurship, rights, and public health. Youth engaged in waste work were often criminalized and harassed by local authorities, while serving as entry-points for various development interventions focused on urban ecologies including sac farming and sanitation services. In both instances, the urban environment was at once subject to entrepreneurial urbanism in the absence of public provisions, and also to everyday negotiated practices and tensions within neighbourhoods and the city more broadly.

Building on my PhD, one of my current projects investigates and theorizes contemporary trends in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems through comparative research theorizing from my research on informal economies of waste in Nairobi, Kenya, and examining emerging London-based forms of repair and re-use. Cultures of repair have long-established histories as crucial aspects of human productive effort, yet they have often been invisible to mainstream measures of production, economic activity, and consumption. In Nairobi, everyday survival depends on prolonging the usable lives of material things, especially in low-income areas experiencing rapid urbanisation and inadequate public service provision. Conversely in London, where 'make do and mend' practices integral to wartime coping strategies were replaced in the second half of the 20th century with disposable consumption, repair is experiencing a revival. Grassroots initiatives are seeking to prolong the durability of objects through practices of mending, re-use, and up-cycling, yet little is known about the motivations of 'bricoleurs' and to what extent these practices challenge and even reverse the take-make-waste models of production and consumption. These 'inner' circular economies are pro-business but also reflect practices of frugality, improvisation and adaptation, challenging the consumption-discard nexus and planned obsolescence of capitalist modes of production, and in today's context of austerity also reflect frugal economic rationalities.

1. Youth, hustling, and belonging in precarious urban environments

Spending Time

This British Institute of Eastern Africa research project aims to bring together researchers and practitioners whose work engages with questions related to Spending Time. Studies on the cultural constructions of time have long fascinated scholars, with notable emphasis on how conceptions of the future grant meaning and purpose to the present. This project draws on a rich tradition of anthropological and geographical scholarship challenging inherent assumptions of linearity that characterize the relation between present and future. Considering non-linear temporalities as a point of departure, the goal of this project is to investigate diverse conceptions and experiences of time in everyday contexts of informality, precarity, and improvisation that have come to characterize urban life across different spheres of human activity (e.g. work/labour, leisure, domestic, social, personal life) in the East Africa context.

Making work outside of prison: Young Offenders and Informal Economies (PI)

Funded by a Cambridge University Humanities Grant (2015-2016) and in collaboration with Dr. Lizzie Richardson (Cambridge Geography), this research draws together four disparate disciplinary perspectives to theorise the cultural and economic geographies of informal economies and their effects on young people living in precarity. The informal sector in the UK is increasingly prevalent, but poorly understood. This project addresses this deficit by investigating the skills, aspirations, and risks associated with informal and/or illicit economies amongst young offenders in austerity Britain who are serving short-term prison sentences. It addresses the empirical gap between the statistics indicating the rise in insecure forms of employment in austerity Britain and the growth but under-documentation of the informal economy in the global North. Through long qualitative interviews with offenders serving short-term sentences, the research documented offenders' conceptions and experiences of 'work' together with the future aspirations and perceived opportunities associated with it, seeking to understand calculations of risk and reward; and social and economic rationalities associated with street culture. Broadly, the research argues how appreciation of the changing spaces, times and legalities of employment is vital for policy connecting future welfare and work, to adapt to a climate where workers are simultaneously more flexible but less secure.

In relation to this project, Tatiana co-convened (with Geography colleagues Dr. Lizzie Richardson and Professor Brendan Burchell of Cambridge University) a research group titled Rethinking work following a Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) grant.

Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of integration and response between ‘camps’ and the city (PI)

This project brings together my research interests in informality, labour limbo, and social navigation of uncertain urban life. Funded by the British Academy UK International Challenges award, and in collaboration with Dr. Eszter Kovacs (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Kavita Ramakrishnan (UEA) the project aims to provide an alternative account of the European ‘refugee crisis’, where the arrival of over 1.5 million refugees since 2015 has stretched EU and individual state capacities; tested formal registration and arrival procedures; and (reignited) debates around continental ‘margins’ and geopolitical power differentials between east and west Europe. In this project, we provincialise and challenge narratives of ‘the crisis’ through an engagement with the evolving duties of care, needs and agencies of refugees and providers on the arrival ‘frontlines’. Our multi-sited research has engaged in punctuated ethnography in four European capital cities: Athens, Budapest, Berlin, and Paris. By ‘thinking from the south’ and vantage of post-colonial cities, we have aimed to document the improvisation, precarity, makeshift practices and alternative scripts of citizenship that refugees and local agencies utilize alongside how state rules and norms are negotiated. More information can be found on our project website: www.camps2cities.com and here.

Development Frontiers in Crime, Livelihoods and Urban Poverty in Nigeria (FCLP) (Co-I)

Funded by ESRC/ DfID Development Frontiers Award (with UCL colleague James Cheshire as PI), this project responds to a call to “fund innovative, strategic and catalytic research with the potential to radically impact on sustainable development concepts or practices, or lead to new thinking and action on poverty reduction”. One of the key development barriers in lower income countries are the adverse impacts of crime and urban poverty on the livelihoods of urban residents, and on the socio-economic well-being of communities in general. Our research collaboration between UCL and ABU Zaria focuses on the dynamics and interlinkages of crime, livelihood and urban poverty in second-tier cities in Africa. We have approached this challenge by creating a research design which incorporates mixed method approaches ranging from urban ethnographic techniques, semi-structured interviews and household survey questionnaires, along with statistical modelling and applied GIS to map and visualise inter-city perceptions and experiences of crime. More information can be found on our project website.

1. Social Enterprise and Development

Corporate-community encounters

I am interested in applying an anthropological and geographical lens to the claims and counter-claims of enterprise-led approaches to poverty alleviation. This is an area that has been, to date, under-studied by geographers and yet environmental problems have become fertile sites for social entrepreneurs. My work seeks to critically evaluate the processes, discourses and impacts of enterprise- and corporate-driven development encounters with low-income communities. A number of hybrid development models are founded on the premise that the survival strategies of the poor are sites of potential opportunity and partnership, giving way to particular forms of "ethicised" capitalism. As such, new potential sites for ethnographic and geographical research have opened up, to study how the social, cultural, and economic structures of low-income communities become refashioned as entry points for the incubation of various enterprise-led solutions to poverty alleviation, development and sustainability strategies. My PhD research incorporated project ethnography of SC Johnson's "Base of the Pyramid" initiative (2005-2013) in low-income urban communities of Nairobi focused on community-led sanitation services. The research explored the complementary and contradictory perceptions and definitions of "success" amongst diverse institutional and community-based actors, grounding the qualitative study of one company's sustainability efforts and encounter with “hustle economies” within the broader politics of enterprise-led development.

Radical Social Enterprise

One of the most urgent and complex challenges facing Southern cities is the large-scale lack of productive employment and access to socio-economic rights in the form of vital services. This multi-year research project (July 2017-December 2020) will endeavour to bring together diverse literatures on social and solidarity economies; the circular economy; and the informal economy, and draw on the integrative and spatial implications of design thinking and digital culture. We explore the potentials for cross-pollination between these seemingly disparate literatures, particularly in relation to practices of place-making. Following this literature review, the research will involve in-depth case studies of homegrown innovations in diverse African cities, (including Nairobi), where forms of what we call "radical social enterprise" are promoting livelihood opportunities for marginalised youth, practices of place-making, and commitments to social justice at neighbourhood-scales. The project is pursued in collaboration with Professor Edgar Pieterse, at the Centre for African Cities, University of Cape Town.