Dr Natalie Morningstar is a social anthropologist who focuses on the anthropology of liberal democratic politics, activism, art, and nationalism in the Euro-American region. She has conducted fieldwork in Ireland since 2014 and is currently undertaking ESRC-funded research on the relationship between anti-austerity activism and party politics north and south of the Irish border after Brexit.
She joined the School of Anthropology and Conservation in 2021, after undertaking an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and an appointment as an Affiliated Lecturer and Teaching Associate, both at the University of Cambridge. She earned her PhD in Social Anthropology and MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and her BA in Anthropology from Yale University, where she studied biological anthropology and primate genetics in the context of a four-field anthropology degree.
Dr Morningstar’s work focuses on the relationship between experiences of economic inequality, labour and political consciousness. Her work draws on ethnographic research with artists and activists in the Republic of Ireland and examines their understanding of the successes and failures of liberal democratic politics in the wake of the 2008 recession.
Dr Morningstar explores the ways in which young creative labourers were enlisted in projects of economic revitalisation and urban regeneration in Dublin after 2008, and the effects of these policy initiatives on their creative labour, the informal spaces in which they worked and organised and their activist campaigns – including their mobilisations for reproductive rights and access to affordable housing.
Her current research departs from the observation that many of the same young activists organising after 2008 have recently supported the pro-unification political party, Sinn Féin (SF), in the 2020 Irish General Election. Dr Morningstar is examining the relationship between their past activist mobilisations, their social relationships in the neighbourhoods in which they live in the city, and their current party-political fidelity to SF.
She is also exploring the ways in which the party has managed to galvanise a base of a type not currently successfully consolidated in other contemporary European liberal democracies, owing to their marriage of promises for a more robust social state, an anti-austerity message, and a pro-European and cosmopolitan stance after Brexit.
The above work has resulted in a series of publications, in journals including Social Anthropology and Anthropological Theory. Dr Morningstar is also currently writing a book manuscript analysing contemporary left-wing activism in the European region.
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