Category:Research

From Urban Press

In theory, provided I'm on the ball, everything I post which is even remotely related to my area of academic interest ie. anthropology, should appear here. My primary research interests include:

• Urban and Subcultural Ethnography
• Anthropology of Globalisation.
• Marginal Identities.

Current Research

It is my intention to use participant observation to document the construction and performance of identity amongst mainland China’s largest enclave of corporate expatriates, in Shanghai, and to explore the extent to which transnational identities are manifest within this community. Using the resulting data, as well as text gleaned from interviews and personal narrative, I intend to examine how this community of expatriates is bounded, whether these boundaries are fixed or contingent, and how their construction is influenced by expatriate privilege. Finally, by comparing the existing scholarship on Western expatriate communities with my own observations, it ought to be possible to suggest some parallels between them, hopefully broadening our understanding of Western transnational identity in the process. I hope to spend a year in China conducting this research.