Postgraduate

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Ethnobiology MSc, PhD

This is a research programme within the Anthropology subject area.

Outline

We welcome students with the appropriate background for research. If you wish to study for a single year, you can do the MA or MSc by research, a 12-month independent research project.

The first year may include coursework, especially methods modules for students who need this additional training. In general, you work closely with one supervisor throughout your research, although you have a committee of three (including your primary supervisor) overseeing your progress. If you want to research in the area of applied computing in social anthropology, you would also have a supervisor based in the School of Computing.

If you are interested in registering for a research degree, you should contact the member of staff whose research is the most relevant to your interests. You should include a curriculum vitae, a short (1,000-word) research proposal, and a list of potential funding sources.

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Programme structure

In Anthropology we pride ourselves on having a close-knit group of research students who know and can approach any member of staff for help and assistance. We have an ongoing staff/student research seminar with a varied programme of seminars given by members of the department and visitors. There is a special seminar for research students in which advanced training is provided (subject to discussion with each cohort of students), students practise upgrade presentations and later present chapters of their draft thesis.

Research students are encouraged to audit courses from the taught Master's (eg in field methods) and sometimes from the undergraduate programme. There are special training courses for research students run by the Graduate School, Information Services and Unit for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching. There is a departmental IT officer who can provide assistance and advice in IT matters, and a statistics helpdesk is available.

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Research areas

Social Anthropology

The related themes of ethnicity, nationalism, identity, conflict, and multiculturalism form a major focus of our current work in the Middle East, the Balkans, South Asia, Amazonia and Central America, Europe (including the United Kingdom), Oceania and South-East Asia.

Our research extends to inter-communal violence, mental health, diasporas, pilgrimage, inter-communal trade, urban ethnogenesis and the study of contemporary religions and their global connections.

We research issues in fieldwork and methodology more generally, with a strong and expanding interest in the field of visual anthropology. Our work on identity and locality links with growing strengths in customary law, kinship and parenthood. This is complemented by work on the language of relatedness, child health and on the cognitive bases of kinship terminologies.

A final strand of our research focuses on policy and advocacy issues and examines the connections between morality and law, legitimacy and corruption, public health policy and local healing strategies, legal pluralism and property rights, and the regulation of marine resources.

Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

Work in these areas is focused on the Centre for Biocultural Diversity. We conduct research on ethnobiological knowledge systems and other systems of environmental knowledge as well as local responses to deforestation, climate change, natural resource management, medical ethnobotany, the impacts of mobility and displacement and the interface between conservation and development. Current projects include trade in materia medica in Ladakh and Bolivia, food systems, ethno-ornithology, the development of buffer zones for protected areas and phytopharmacy among migrant diasporas.

Digital Anthropology: Cultural Informatics, Social Invention and Computational Methods

Since 1985, we have been exploring and applying new approaches to research problems in anthropology – often, as in the case of hypermedia, electronic and internet publishing, digital media, expert systems and large-scale textual and historical databases, up to a decade before other anthropologists. Today, we are exploring cloud media, semantic networks, multi-agent modelling, dual/blended realities, data mining, smart environments and how these are mediated by people into new possibilities and capabilities.

Our major developments have included advances in kinship theory and analysis supported by new computational methods within field-based studies and as applied to detailed historical records; qualitative analysis of textual and ethnographic materials; and computer-assisted approaches to visual ethnography. We are extending our range to quantitative approaches for assessing qualitative materials, analysing social and cultural invention, the active representation of meaning, and the applications and implications of mobile computing, sensing and communications platforms and the transformation of virtual into concrete objects, institutions and structures.

Biological Anthropology

Biological Anthropology is the newest of the University of Kent Anthropology research disciplines. We are interested in a diverse range of research topics within biological and evolutionary anthropology. These include bioarchaeology, human reproductive strategies, hominin evolution, primate behaviour and ecology, modern human variation, cultural evolution and Palaeolithic archaeology. This work takes us to many different regions of the world (Asia, Africa, Europe, the United States), and involves collaboration with international colleagues from a number of organisations. We have a dedicated research laboratory and up-to-date computing facilities to allow research in many areas of biological anthropology.

Currently, work is being undertaken in a number of these areas, and research links have been forged with colleagues at Kent in archaeology and biosciences, as well as with those at the Powell-Cotton Museum, the Budongo Forest Project (Uganda) and University College London.

Kent Osteological Research and Analysis (KORA) offers a variety of osteological services for human remains from archaeological contexts.

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Staff research

Full details of staff research interests can be found on our website.

Dr Judith Bovensiepen: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Anthropology of South-East Asia; East Timor; place and landscape; kinship and reciprocity; colonial history; conflict; conspiracy talk; post-conflict healing and reconstruction.

Glenn Bowman: Reader in Social Anthropology; Deputy Head of School

West Bank Palestine and the former Yugoslavia; shrines, monumentalisation, pilgrimage, intercommunal relations, identity politics, nationalism, walling; Orthodox and heterodox Christianity, Sufism; anthropological and psychoanalytic approaches to identity; fieldwork theory. Recent publications include: After Yugoslavia: Identities and Politics within the Successor States (co-ed, 2011); Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-communal Relations Around Holy Places (2012).

Dr Melissa Demian: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

The Suau Coast of south-eastern Papua New Guinea; the anthropology of law and legal pluralism; property theory; the concepts of cultural patrimony and ‘culture loss'; ‘cultural defence' in American and British courtrooms.

Professor Roy Ellen: Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology

Eastern Indonesia; ethnobiological knowledge systems; knowledge transmission and the reproduction of systems of practices; inter-island trade; environmental anthropology; culture and cognition.

Professor Michael Fischer: Professor of Anthropological Sciences

The representation and structure of indigenous knowledge; cultural informatics; the inter-relationships between ideation and the material contexts within which ideation is expressed.

Dr David Henig: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Central Asia and east Mediterranean; anthropology of Islam; socialist/post socialist economy and society; exchange and materiality; cosmological thought; landscape and environment; narrativity and ethnographic theory; social networks and sociality.

Dr Matthew Hodges: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

France, Euskadi, Europe; time, historical consciousness, modernity, rural social transformation, cultural and heritage tourism; science and technology; continental philosophy; public anthropology, creative writing.

Dr Sarah Johns: Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology

Evolutionary psychology and behavioural ecology; timing of life-history events; human reproduction, especially variation of the age at first birth and the evolved psychology of reproductive decision making.

Dr Stephen Lycett: Senior Lecturer in Human Evolution

Palaeoanthropology; Biological Anthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology, especially cultural evolution; cultural transmission theory and material culture; morphometrics; lithic analysis; hominin dispersals; hominid phylogenetics; species identification in the fossil record.

Dr Patrick Mahoney: Lecturer in Biological Anthropology

Evolutionary developmental biology of hominoid dentition; bioarchaeology, especially prehistoric human diet; palaeopathology.

Dr Nicholas Newton-Fisher: Senior Lecturer in Primate Behavioural Ecology

Evolutionary ecology and behaviour of mammals with an emphasis on primates, in particular chimpanzees, including male-female aggression and sexual coercion, hunting behaviour, social behaviour, feeding ecology and ranging patterns.

Dr Daniela Peluso: Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Gender; exchange theory; kinship; development; indigenous urbanisation; medical anthropology; indigenismo; hybridity; personhood and identity; anthropology of business.

Professor João de Pina-Cabral: Professor of Social Anthropology

The relationship between symbolic thought and social power; family and kinship; ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Dr Mike Poltorak: Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Tonga; Oceania; New Zealand; Brighton and Hove; Rajasthan; India; visual anthropology; mental illness; medical anthropology; transnationalism; ethnopsychiatry; vaccination; applied medical anthropology; cultural politics; indigenous epistemologies and modernities; the medical/visual/development anthropology nexus.

Dr Dimitrios Theodossopoulos: Reader in Social Anthropology

Political and environmental anthropology; Panama; Greece; ethnic relations and stereotyping; globalisation and indigeneity; sustainability.

Dr Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel: Lecturer in Biological Anthropology

Evolutionary anthropology; past hominin dispersal; geometric morphometrics; comparative shape analysis of Palaeolithic stone tools; microevolutionary analysis of carniometric variation within modern humans.

Dr Anna Waldstein: Lecturer in Medical Anthropology and Ethnobotany

Medical anthropology; ethnopharmacology; Mesoamerica and migration; the effects of migration and acculturation on health; the use of traditional medical knowledge as an adaptive strategy among migrants; the nutritional consequences of mass-produced food; biocultural constructions of addiction.

Further information:

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Contact details

Admissions enquiries
T: +44 (0)1227 827272
E:information@kent.ac.uk
Subject enquiries
School of Anthropology and Conservation,
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NS, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827928
F: +44 (0)1227 827289
E: sacoffice@kent.ac.uk

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How to apply

Before applying, please read our ‘How to apply’ section.

You can then go straight to the online application form by clicking the programme below:

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Publishing Office - © University of Kent

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 764000

Last Updated: 13/09/2011