SeNSS pathway: Social Anthropology

SeNSS university: University of Kent

Primary mentor: Prof Dimitrios Theossodopoulos (University of Kent)

Second mentor: Prof Sophie Day (Goldsmiths, University of London. Dep of Anthropology)

Research topic title: Reconfigurations of care under austerity

Research project description:

Reconfigurations of Care under Austerity is an original project that stems from long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between July 2015 and January 2017 in a self-organised social clinic in Athens. In the critical period of the economic crisis, the public healthcare sector underwent a severe retrenchment programme during which time, starting with 2010, more and more Greek citizens found their medical needs unmet. The social clinics of solidarity represent a local, spontaneous response to the economic crisis: they try to compensate for what the state has been unable to provide during the first years of austerity. In doing so, they mobilise local and culturally inflected ideas about care and biomedicine. While social scientific research has focused on the positive dimensions of volunteering and solidarity, the adverse social and medical effects of free provision of pharmaceuticals have been, so far, overlooked. The project sheds light onto the micropolitics of care hidden behind the circulation and consumption of different classes of medications and explores how access to free medicines has increasingly shaped people’s reliance on, compliance with, and dependence on pharmaceuticals.

Publications:

• Bonanno, L. (2020) Book Review: Nadia C. Seremetakis, Sensing the Everyday. Dialogues from Austerity Greece. Social Anthropology/ Antrhopologie Sociale.

• Bonanno L. (2020) Eerie Desires for the Authoritarian State. Covid-19 Updates from Italy. AllegraLab [Online] 30 March 2020.

• Bonanno, L. (2019) I swear I hated it. A semi- serious, but definitely (autobio-, bio- and ethno-) graphic leap into the ethnographic practice of drawing. Entanglements. Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography 2(2): 39-55

• Bonanno, L. (2019) ‘Drawing as a mode of translation’ in Atalay, S. Bonanno L. et al., Ethnographic Storytelling: Communicating Research and Exploring Pedagogical Approaches through Graphic Narratives, Drawings and Zines. American Anthropologist, 121(3).

Planned publications:

Building on my previous experience with academic publications and benefitting from my skills as an illustrator and graphic artist, I will combine standard academic outputs (e.g. monograph, articles) with innovative ethnographic media (graphic ethnography, popularisation of key outcomes) to maximise the impact of my research for the benefit of local audiences in Greece (professionals and volunteers in social clinics). I will further pursue opportunities to share the benefits of using artwork for impact generation with the academic community. I aim to use the network established by SeNSS in the Southeast to bring together early-career researchers interested in multimodal ethnography. I am committed both to providing practical and methodological training on alternative media for impactful dissemination and sharing my knowledge with a wider community of researchers.

Other Information:

Some of my “ethnographic” illustrations have been selected and showcased at the RAI online exhibition ‘Illustrating Anthropology’ https://illustratinganthropology.com. I have also organised a couple of labs on drawing as anthropology- making and drawing and ethnographic methods.

Contact details:

Email: Letizia.bonanno@gmail.com

Twitter: @letha_laetitia

SeNSS pathway: Sociology

SeNSS university Goldsmiths, University of London

Primary mentor: Prof Monica Greco (Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Second mentor: Dr Catherine Will (Reader in the Sociology of Science and Technology, University of Sussex)

External Mentor: Dr Richard Milne (Senior Social Scientist, Wellcome Genome Campus)

Research topic title: ‘Doing diagnosis differently’: An exploration of vitality and technology in mental health

Research project description:

How do new methods of detecting neurodegenerative disease map the ‘person-in-time’? How do people come to participate in techno-scientific projects that track cognitive decline and diagnose dementia earlier and more intensively than ever before? What ethical and epistemic challenges do these new measurement and diagnostic practices bring? In this fellowship, I will draw on empirical, methodological, and conceptual insights from my PhD and post-doc to develop a research programme to tackle these pressing questions.

My project speaks to a broader set of interests in the changing face of psychiatric diagnosis, including different or emergent ways of making sense of the 'normal’ and the 'pathological’ in mental health. My PhD was an ethnographic exploration of issues of access to mental health care in the voluntary sector in which I made visible how providers articulate mental health needs in alternative non-diagnostic ways, and how this took place in particular socio-material conditions. I will develop these interests in the intersecting fields of dementia research and ‘digital psychiatry’.

Under the mentorship of Monica Greco in Goldsmiths’ Sociology Department, I will generate creative and ‘live’ ways to engage with the spaces and temporalities of mental health systems in a ‘hyper-cognitive’ society. The outputs combine academic publications of my PhD and emergent post-doc work, user/public engagement, and scoping research with the MRC Dementias Platform UK’s “Deep and Frequent Phenotyping” project.

Publications:

• Brenman, N.F. (2020) “Pandemic vitality: on living and being alive in lockdown” COVID-19 FORUM Social Anthropology.

• Brenman, N.F. & Milne, R. (under review) “‘Ready for what?’ Timing and potentiality in Alzheimer’s disease research” Manuscript submitted for publication.

• Brenman, N.F. & Milne, R. (under review) “Lived time and the affordances of dementia prevention research participation” Manuscript submitted for publication.

• Brenman, N. F. (forthcoming) “Placing precarity: access and belonging in the shifting landscape of UK mental health care” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

• Brenman, N. F. 2019. “A composite case: Thinking with ‘BME’ categories in UK mental health care” Medicine Anthropology Theory, 6 (4) 291–300.

• Cowan, H., Brenman, N. F. & Kühlbrandt, C. 2019. “Repoliticizing public health.” Anthropology Today 35(1) 28.

• Brenman, N. F., Hiddinga, A., & Wright, B. (2017). “Intersecting Cultures in Deaf Mental Health: An Ethnographic Study of NHS Professionals Diagnosing Autism in D/deaf Children.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 41 (3), 431-452.

• Brenman, N. F., Luitel, N. P., Mall, S., & Jordans, M. J. (2014). “Demand and access to mental health services: a qualitative formative study in Nepal.” BMC International Health and Human Rights, 14 (1) 22.

Planned publications:

• "Doing need differently: the labour of inclusion in voluntary sector psychotherapy services in the UK" Target journal: Medical Anthropology

• "Making milieu: a ‘vital’ methodology for studying relations between place and need in mental health care" Target journal: Sociological Review

• "Where is cognitive decline made to matter? Bringing pre-dementia Alzheimer’s to ‘life’ in the clinical research facility." Target journal: Biosocieties (in co-edited special issue)

• "Casting long shadows: phenotyping dementia and the making of the digital ageing subject" Target journal: Big Data and Society (invited contribution to special issue)

Other Information:

Public health and bioethics affiliations: I will continue my contributions to ethics and society working groups in the field of ageing and dementia via an honorary contract with Cambridge Public Health the University of Cambridge. My current focus for this is the RECORD study: Researching the Effects of Covid On Research in Dementia in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Dementias Platform UK.

Other academic collaborations: I am currently developing projects with our London-based ‘Vitalities Collective’ research group, and am coordinating an online blog series with colleagues at MIT and the New School NYC on: Tracking Digital Psy: Mental Health and Technology in an Age of Disruption

Contact details:

Email: n.brenman@gold.ac.uk / nkf23@cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @NFBrenman

SeNSS pathway: Science, Technology, and Sustainability Studies

SeNSS university: University of Surrey

Primary mentor: Dr. Kate Burningham (University of Surrey)

Second mentor: Dr. Richard Nunes (University of Reading)

Research topic title: Planning for transitions? Exploring the interface between planning, politics and grassroots sustainability transitions

Research project description:

Amy’s PhD research reveals the politics of using the planning system for more sustainable placemaking (Burnett, 2019), explored through the case study of Frome, Somerset. Frome is a timely and highly interesting case where in 2011 a local, independent non-party political group won 10 out of 17 seats in the town council; since 2015, they hold all 17 seats. This group, the Independents for Frome (IfF), has to various degrees, been influenced by the thinking of ‘Transition’ reflected within the Transition (town) movement. Transition is an alternative, international social movement that seeks to build ‘parallel infrastructure’ to transform communities through principles of permaculture and relocalisation (i.e. ultra-localised action). The lessons on mainstreaming these alternative structures are especially timely during the current coronavirus pandemic.

Exploring Frome’s experiences and reasons for success can give others who seek to cultivate positive environmental action in their communities, through (neighbourhood) planning or local politics, insights into how this can happen. Amy’s research also reveals the politics and the tensions of ‘independent’ actors as protagonists seeking to challenge incumbent ‘regime’ institutions, particularly when the tools made available to local actors under the government’s Localism policy agenda may not always bring the desired benefits promised to them.

The Fellowship will enable Amy to develop several publications that build on the contributions of her PhD (see planned publications). Amy will also work with and bring together identified stakeholders, many of whom may work on different elements of local action - placemaking, politics and planning. She will convene a national-level workshop to share insights, frustrations and opportunities to effect more positive transitions at different scales and in different ‘sectors’, helping to overcome the challenge of institutional silos and encourage more collaborative approaches to cultivate and capture sustainability transitions. Amy will also work with think tanks and policy actors this could help to level up these discussions into concrete actions to support a framework for systemic transitions. For instance, using Frome’s experiences to reconstruct the governance of local politics as a means to question the effectiveness of such an approach and its relevance to post-Brexit politics and resilience responses to the Covid pandemic.

Publications:

• Burnett, A and Nunes, R (in press) Flatpack Democracy: power and politics at the boundaries of transition. For potential inclusion in an Environmental Policy and Governance Special Issue.

• Bradley, Q, Burnett, A, Sparling, W (2017) Neighbourhood Planning and the Spatial Practices of Localism. Neighbourhood Planning: Power to the People? Policy Press.

• Merritt*, A and Stubbs, T (2012) Complementing the Local and the Global: promoting sustainability action through linked local-level formal sustainability funding mechanisms. Public Administration and Development. Volume 32, Issue 3, pp. 278-291. Rio+20 special edition: August 2012.

• Merritt, A and Stubbs, T (2012) Incentives to Promote Green Citizenship in UK Transition Towns. Development, Issue 55, pp. 96-103. Rio+20 special edition: March 2012. née Merritt.

Other Information:

Amy’s Fellowship involves collaborating with several partners, including ECOLISE (European network for community-led initiatives on climate change), the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and DRIFT (a network of academic sustainability transitions scholars based in the Netherlands to advance both theoretical and practical contributions in her research field. During her Fellowship, Amy will also play an active role in research network the Centre for Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).

Contact details:

Email: a.burnett@surrey.ac.uk

SeNSS pathway: Psychology

SeNSS university: University of Essex

Primary mentor: Dr Vanessa Loaiza (University of Essex)

Second mentor: Dr Rachel McCloy (University of Reading)

Research topic title: A smart system to empower healthy food choices

Research project description:

Proper nutrition and healthy diets are a key aspect of health, which mandatory food labelling in the UK tries to address by empowering people with the information to help them make healthier choices. The format of this information (e.g., verbal quantifiers like 'low fat' or numerical quantifiers like '5% fat') affects whether people can easily understand and use food labels. Examining how people's judgements and decisions with respect to food differ depending on food label format therefore has wide-reaching impact for health policy decisions, consumer behaviour, and food industry practice. My project will use computational methods to identify different strategies people use to decide what foods are healthiest (e.g., less fat, or less sugar, etc.) I will evaluate which strategies produce the healthiest choices, use these insights to inform policy and conduct knowledge exchange with an industry partner.

The project will consolidate my PhD, which investigated differences in people's decision-making strategies when using verbal and numerical quantifiers on food labels. Using a mixture of behavioural tasks, surveys, and eye-tracking methodology, I identified that different ways of presenting quantities can lead to people relying on different pieces of information to judge food. I intend to extend this research and maximise its impact in four ways.

First, I will apply new and advanced statistical modelling to my research. To classify and predict food choice strategies in my data, I will learn two modelling techniques: multinomial processing trees, a probability-based method to classify choices, and machine learning, which makes predictions based on patterns in data. Second, I will extend the impact of my work through knowledge exchange with the start-up company Keep Fit Eat Fit Wellbeing Ltd (KFEF). Third, I will disseminate my research findings to academic and non-academic audiences through journal articles, conference presentations, press releases, and engaging with policy-makers. Finally, I will continue to seek grant funding for my work to improve the food choice environment for consumers and empower them to make informed, healthy choices.

Publications:

• Liu, D., Juanchich, M., & Sirota, M. (2020). The directionality of verbal and numerical quantifiers affects the attribute framing effect. Acta Psychologica, 208, 103088. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103088

• Liu, D., Juanchich, M., Sirota, M., & Orbell, S. (2020). Differences between decisions made using verbal or numerical quantities. Thinking and Reasoning. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2020.1720813

• Liu, D., Juanchich, M., Sirota, M., & Orbell, S. (2020). The intuitive use of contextual information in decisions made with verbal and numerical quantities. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73, 481-494. doi: 10.1177/1747021820903439

• Liu, D., Juanchich, M., Sirota, M., & Orbell, S. (2019). People overestimate verbal quantities of nutrients on nutrition labels. Food Quality and Preference, 78, 103739. doi: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2019.103739

• Liu, D., & Juanchich, M. (2018). Conceptual understanding and quantity inferences: A new framework for examining consumer understanding of food energy. Public Health Nutrition, 21,3168-3177. doi: 10.1017/S1368980018002021

• Liu, D., & Juanchich, M. (2017). Want to prime exercise? Calorie labels work better than activity ones! Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK.

Planned publications:

• Holford, D.L., Juanchich, M., & Sirota, M. (under review). How much and why do verbal and numerical attribute frames affect judgements? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

• Holford, D.L., Juanchich, M., Foulsham, T., Sirota, M., & Clarke, A.D.F. (under review). Eye-tracking evidence for attention asymmetries in verbal and numerical quantifier processing. Psychological Research.

• Holford, D.L. (in prep). Can suggested alternatives help consumers make better choices?

Other Information:

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy with teaching experience in Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology. I am also a member of the SciBeh Reconfiguring Behavioural Science project and the Psychological Science Accelerator. In my spare time, I am an avid runner (and used to be a sailor for Singapore).

Contact details:

Email: dawn.liuholford@gmail.com

Twitter: @dlholf

SeNSS pathway: Social Anthropology

SeNSS university: University of Sussex

Primary mentor:

Second mentor:

Research topic title:

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Publications:

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Other Information:

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SeNSS pathway: Psychology

SeNSS university: University of Sussex

Primary mentor: Professor Chris Bird (University of Sussex)

Second mentor: Dr Louis Renoult (University of Sussex)

Research topic title: Learning of schemas and making sense of complex events.

Research project description:

The world can be confusing. To comprehend an everyday situation we often have to integrate information over time that is coming from our multiple senses. We often rely on our prior knowledge in order to make sense of what is happening around us. For instance, walking into an airport, we might expect to see a lot of people with suitcases and passports. In my thesis I examined the effects prior knowledge has on our understanding of complex events. I used brain scanning and video stimuli to test how we use prior information to understand an everyday conversation. In a separate experiment I trained participants to become knowledgeable about particular characters taken from a TV show and later tested how this affected their memory for clips taken from the same or a different show.

The main aim of this fellowship is to build on my PhD work and test how we learn new information that is related to our prior knowledge. Specifically, I will use brain imaging data from participants collected over the course of weeks that will help me assess how participants extract information from the multiple episodes to acquire knowledge about the characters of the show. The fellowship would allow me to test how incoming information is slowly transformed to knowledge that can later guide our understanding.

The fellowship will allow me to build my research profile and form strong academic connections with researchers from University of Toulouse with which I am collaborating. Furthermore, it will allow me to publish work from my PhD and write a review to consolidate the currently emerging literature on prior knowledge using complex stimuli.

Publications:

• Raykov, P. P., Keidel, J. L., Oakhill, J., & Bird, C. M. (2020). The brain regions supporting schema-related processing of people’s identities. Cognitive neuropsychology, 37(1-2), 8-24.

• Raykov, P. P., Keidel, J. L., Oakhill, J., & Bird, C. M. (2018). Shared contextual knowledge strengthens inter-subject synchrony and pattern similarity in the semantic network. BioRxiv, 276683.

• Farooq, A., Raykov, Y. P., Raykov, P., & Little, M. A. (2020). Latent feature sharing: an adaptive approach to linear decomposition models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12369.

Contact details:

Email address: P.Raykov@sussex.ac.uk

SeNSS pathway: Psychology

SeNSS university: Goldsmiths, University of London

Primary mentor: Prof Lauren Stewart

Second mentor: Prof Susan Ayers

Research topic title: Community Health Interventions through Musical Engagement (CHIME) for Perinatal Mental Health

Research project description:

Mental health problems during pregnancy and after birth (the perinatal period) are of global concern. They affect up to 1 in 5 women worldwide and can be twice as frequent in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).In my PhD work, I developed and piloted a low-cost, non-stigmatizing and culturally-embedded intervention: CHIME (Community Health Intervention through Music Engagement) to support the mental health of pregnant women in The Gambia. There is good evidence from high-income countries that engaging with music can have substantial health benefits including improving symptoms of anxiety and depression and sense of belonging. My PhD work explored how these findings could be applied in The Gambia, where existing musical practices around health provided a strong foundation. We co-developed a brief intervention where community-based women's groups led music sessions with local pregnant women. We evaluated the intervention in terms of its feasibility, acceptability and potential benefit for anxiety and depression, finding positive outcomes in all areas. While the potential for women's groups to improve maternal and newborn health in low-resource contexts is well recognized, the use of participatory music for this purpose is novel and potentially highly impactful, addressing a gap in recommendations for mental health interventions in LMICs.

In the fellowship year, I will conduct a scoping study to ascertain whether the intervention we developed to support perinatal mental health can be generalized to other LMIC. Within this study I will present the challenges, considerations and necessary adaptations that would be required for community music interventions for perinatal mental health to be implemented in other LMICs.

In addition, I will hold a symposium where I will bring together stakeholders from the academic, charity and public sectors from the UK and abroad interested in music interventions as a way to support perinatal mental health. This will provide a unique and multi-disciplinary perspective on how models of community mental health care in LMICs can contribute to frameworks of relevance to high-income contexts, which are under increasing strain.

I will also consolidate and extend the impact of my PhD by helping launch a Gambian Alliance for Maternal Mental Health and hold an online Maternal Mental Health in Africa symposium. This will mobilize key stakeholders to work in a coordinated way to disseminate key messages around perinatal mental health and to lobby the government to include this as a priority in future policies.

Publications:

• Sanfilippo KRM, McConnell B, Cornelius V, et al (2020) Community psychosocial music intervention (CHIME) to reduce antenatal common mental disorder symptoms in The Gambia: a feasibility trial. BMJ Open, 10(11): e040287. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-040287

• Sanfilippo, K. R. M., Spiro, N., Molina-Solana, M., & Lamont, A. (2020). Do the shuffle: Exploring reasons for music listening through shuffled play. PLOS ONE, 15(2), e0228457. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228457

• Sanfilippo, K. R. M., McConnell, B., Cornelius, V., Darboe, B., Huma, H. B., Gaye, M., Ramchandani, P., Ceesay, H., Glover, V., Cross, I., & Stewart, L. (2019). A study protocol for testing the feasibility of a randomised stepped wedge cluster design to investigate a Community Health Intervention through Musical Engagement (CHIME) for perinatal mental health in The Gambia. Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 5(1), 124. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-019-0515-5

• Dingle, G. A., Clift, S., Finn, S., Gilbert, R., Groarke, J. M., Irons, J. Y., Jones Bartoli, A., Lamont, A., Launay, J., Martin, E. S., Moss, H., Sanfilippo, K. R. M., Shipton, M., Stewart, L., Talbot, S., Tarrant, M., Tip, L., & Williams, E. J. (2019). An agenda for best practice research on group singing , health , and well-being. Music & Science, 2, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204319861719

• Anglada-Tort, M., & Sanfilippo, K. R. M. (2019). Visualizing Music Psychology: A Bibliometric Analysis of Psychology of Music , Music Perception , and Musicae Scientiae from 1973 to 2017. Music & Science, 2, 205920431881178. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204318811786

• Sanfilippo, K. R. M., & Spiro, N. (2017). The Third Nordoff Robbins Plus Conference “Exploring music in therapeutic and community settings.” An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 9(1), 159-163.

Contact details:

Email: ksanf001@gold.ac.uk

Twitter: @krsanfili

SeNSS pathway: Socio-Legal Studies

SeNSS university: University of Kent

Primary mentor: Prof Amanda Perry-Kessaris

Second mentor: Emily Allbon

Research topic title: Reframing ways of doing, talking and thinking about legal and economic phenomena

Research project description:

The way we talk matters. The grammar and vocabulary we use to do, talk, and think about law and economics has a tangible impact on the way we respond to crises, crashes and catastrophes. As a society, our requirements of both the law and the economy have never been so pressing, but the tools we have to reformulate both are currently limited. In this Fellowship, I will develop doctoral work that examines in detail the example of "embeddedness" in the context of an Economic Sociology of Law (ESL), scaling this up to apply the lessons to wider debates about the ways we currently do, talk and think about law and economics.

Are the law and economy embedded in society? Or is society embedded in the economy and its regulation? While these questions have become fashionable more recently, ultimately neither is helpful because they recycle and re-entrench neoclassical economic ideas and doctrinal legal approaches. My work proposes a new grammar and vocabulary that moves us beyond current mental models, allowing us to respond innovatively and ask which voices and interests that we wish to prioritise as a society.

Publications:

• "What can ESL offer to the data collector? Describing, defining, designing and deploying an alternative ESL approach", (2014) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 65(3): 345-55

• "Appropriating rhetoric: a beginner's guide", (2013) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 64(3): 383-95

Planned publications:

• "Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined: Beyond Embeddedness", Routledge (forthcoming, 2021, short form monograph)

• "Telling Stories: Using personae, vignettes and visual approaches to communicate sociolegal concepts, theories and methods", chapter to be submitted to Allbon E and Perry-Kessaris A (2021) "Legal Design for Legal Education"

• "Mountains of Metaphor", interactive graphic design and art installation reflecting on the PhD journey, hosted and promoted by TL;DR legal website; forthcoming

• I will also be setting up a website exploring visual and creative ways of doing, talking and thinking about legal and economic theories, methods and concepts, as well as maintaining my own blog and website (link below).

Other Information:

In addition to the work on doing, talking and thinking about law and economics, I've also been exploring how we might visualise this. I use digital art, 3D modelling and animation to ask what doing, talking and thinking about law and economics differently might look, and sound like. You can see some of work on my website (link below).

Contact details:

Institutional email address: tbc

Email address: clarewilliamsphd@gmail.com

https://claresresearchblog.com

SeNSS pathway: Social Anthropology

SeNSS university: University of Kent

Primary mentor: Prof Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent)

Second mentor: Prof Mark Johnson (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Research topic title: Exploitation and Fairtrade in Costa Rica's Banana industry

Research project description:

When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the juiciest piece, the central coast of my land, the delicate waist of America’. Pablo Neruda La United Fruit Co. from Canto General (1950)

No other commodity symbolizes exploitation in Latin America like the banana. When Pablo Neruda penned the words above in his famous poem of 1950, he was voicing his protest at the creation of ‘Banana Republics’ of Central America. In more recent times, the Fair Trade movement has claimed to offer an alternative, ‘fairer’ type of banana production in the region. But we still don’t know whether this new model is genuinely challenging the exploitation of the so-called Dollar system of banana production in Central America that has long been dominated by U.S. corporations. This project directly addresses this gap by documenting the lives of people working in the region’s banana industry, both on Fair Trade and non-Fair Trade farms.

The present project provides a study of two farms in Costa Rica, one Fair Trade certified and one conventional. Building on my doctoral research, the study demonstrates that Fair Trade, as currently practiced, has only a limited ability to challenge the structural inequalities contained within the Dollar banana industry. I argue that Fair Trade’s current locatedness within neoliberal trade networks, means it is unable to address the structural problems and inequalities that reproduce exploitation. The research is based on a detailed ethnography of the lives of those who work on the banana plantations. Drawing upon a year of fieldwork on the farms, the study exposes how a series of factors - gender, patriarchy, national identity and religious ideology - contribute to the reproduction of inequality and the lack of resistance among workers. The project will be supplemented by new research documenting the responses of Fair Trade policy makers to these challenges.

Publications:

• Ruiz, L. Z. (2018). When to intervene? Ethnographic research with Costa Rican banana workers experiencing various forms of violence. SAGE Research Methods Cases, 11 pp. Doi:10.4135/9781526439529 (peer-reviewed)

• Zaglul Ruiz, Layla (2019) ‘Is fairtrade bananas?’: exploitation and fairtrade in Costa Rica’s banana industry. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University of Sussex.

• Zaglul, L. (2017/11/15). “Navigating unsafe workplaces in Costa Rica’s banana industry.” Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/layla-zaglul/navigating-unsafe-workplaces-in-costa-rica-s-banana-industry

• Zaglul, L. (2018/ 04/23). “Why use bullets when you have crayons? Costa Rican politics looks divided, but its people are hopeful.” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/costa-rican-politics-looks-divided-but-its-people-are-hopeful-94941

• Zaglul, L. (2018/09/25). “Costa Rica’s Public Worker Strike Could Decide Its Fiscal Future.” World Politics Review. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/26083/costa-rica-s-public-worker-strike-could-decide-its-fiscal-future

Planned publications:

• (In preparation) Zaglul Ruiz Layla and Peter Luetchford, (forthcoming 2020) ‘Unpacking Fair Trade Bananas and Coffee: State, Market, and Development in Costa Rica’ Development in Practice. Special Issue for: The Private Sector in the Development Landscape

Other Information:

I hold a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Costa Rica. After working for several years in Costa Rica I moved to the UK to undertake a MA in Anthropology of Development from SOAS, University of London. My MA dissertation explored the relationship between the consumption of Fairtrade bananas in the UK and its production in Costa Rica. In 2014 I began my PhD in International Development at Sussex. My doctoral work analyses the potential Fair Trade has in transforming the exploitative dynamics in the banana trade in Costa Rica.

Contact details: