An Ethnography of Advice

Ana Gutierrez specialises in migration, labour, gender, morality and personhood. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2014. Her doctoral research was a study of Latin American women migrants in London who work in the domestic and sex work industries and who experience personal dislocations which derive from the everyday challenges they face as illegal migrants and intimate labourers, their downward status mobility and the uncertainties they feel towards the future. She has also done research on cooperation and inequality in Oklahoma with Hispanic migrant families. 

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Anna Tuckett specialises in political and legal anthropology, with a specific focus on migration in Italy and the UK, and is particularly interested in how people experience and manage the state, law and bureaucracy in their everyday lives. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2014. Her doctoral research, which examined migrants’ encounters with what she calls the ‘documentation regime’ – the system through which migrants attain and maintain ‘legal status’, bring in relatives through family reunification and access citizenship – offers insights into how law and the state are experienced by migrants in Italy on an everyday basis. Her research has been funded by the ESRC, the Newby Trust and the Central Research Fund. 

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Ryan Davey’s work combines anthropological political economy with the study of subjectivity. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2015 at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork on a housing estate in the south of England, focused on the relation between social class and debt in England. It explored how class is formed through subjects’ optimistic responses to the potential for coercive forms of legal sanction, in the areas of consumer debt, tenancy and motherhood. Previously, he led an applied research project for the Royal College of Psychiatrists investigating the way frontline staff in the UK debt collection industry responds to debtors who disclose mental health problems. He has also carried out ethnographic research with the psychiatric survivor movement in London, focusing in particular on “survivor research,” in which psychiatric survivors and service users produce research based on first-hand experience.

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Matt Wilde received his PhD from the LSE in 2013. He specialises in research on popular and egalitarian politics, the state, ethics and morality, urban environments and political economy. To date his work has explored the lives of working-class residents in two very different contemporary cities: Valencia in Venezuela and London in the UK.

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Tobias Eule works on the relationship between the state and vulnerable populations from an interdisciplinary perspective. He is currently researching government responses to irregular migration in the Schengen Area and the role of legal advice in the interactions between individuals and the state. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2011. His doctoral research was a multi-sited ethnography conducted in four different German government institutions, for which he received the “Toby Jackman Prize for the most Outstanding PhD” from Cambridge in 2012. A resulting book, Inside Immigration Law, was published in 2014.

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Insa Koch works as an Assistant Professor in Law and Anthropology in the LSE Law Department. She is interested in bringing anthropology into dialogue with criminology, legal theory and socio-legal studies. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2013. Her doctoral work was based on an ethnographic assessment of the state, and state-citizen relations on council estates in England. This allowed her to explore how vernacular ideas of citizenship, politics, and the law come into conflict with social and legal policy. 

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Deborah James, whose work previously focused mainly on the anthropology of South and Southern Africa, has recently begun research at some sites in the UK. Her work is broadly political and economic in focus. She has been heading this the collaborative ESRC-funded project entitled ‘An Ethnography of Advice: Between Market, Society and the Declining Welfare State’ since August 2015. Her research focuses on debt and debt advice in the UK, in a setting where new permutations of state, business and charity make it difficult to discern the origins and intentions of advice are often difficult to discern. 

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