Nick works at the intersection of social, psychological and medical anthropology. His work explores the ramifications of political change and therapeutic innovation in post-Suharto Indonesia, and the impact of pandemic control measures in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. He would particularly welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students working in fields related to psychological anthropology, therapeutic traditions, affect, consciousness, COVID-19, and the ethnography of Indonesia and the Malay World. 

Understanding COVID-19 from an anthropological perspective

Nick currently leads the Care And Responsibility Under Lockdown (CARUL) Collective, an international, interdisciplinary social science research team that he founded in 2020 with Dr Sharyn Graham Davies, then based at Auckland University of Technology. The group’s first report examined the merits of New Zealand-style ‘bubbles’ as a pathway out of lockdown. This research has helped inform international policy debates about pandemic control measures, and has received coverage in outlets including BBC News, LBC, New Scientist, and The Telegraph. Nick himself summarised some of the key findings of the study in an op-ed for The Guardian. 

Since then, CARUL has written on multiple additional aspects of life in New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the ethical reasoning that characterised life during lockdown, homeschooling, the experiences of community healthcare and other frontline workers, emergent forms of policing and funerary practice, and the dynamics of social recovery in periods when the virus had been eliminated. 

In addition to his work in the CARUL Collective, Nick has contributed to the LSE Covid and Care group’s UK-based research on the ‘right to care’, local lockdowns, and death and bereavement during the pandemic. He has also written single-authored pieces on the limits of ‘stay-at-home’ policies, and the methodological innovations necessitated by COVID-19.

Understanding socio-cultural change in Indonesia

Nick has been conducting research in Indonesia since 2005. His first monograph, Being Malay in Indonesia, used ethnographic observation of everyday life in a newly created Indonesian province to develop a new framework for the study of political decentralisation: one which foregrounds the affective and experiential dimensions of political change. The book also offers fresh perspectives on many classic themes in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, including Malay identity, ‘spirit beliefs’, market cultures, poetry, memories of violence, and cross-border relations. 

Following a British Academy postdoc, in which he explored further aspects of political life in the Riau Islands, including the rise of post-democratic sentiment, the state’s exercise of Islamic authority, and the varied but often painful feelings associated with restoring the freedom to practice Confucianism to Indonesia’s Chinese population, Nick began researching the growth of Indonesia’s hypnosis industry. In recent years, tens of thousands Indonesians have trained as hypnotists and hypnotherapists, and hypnotherapeutic techniques have been incorporated into non-clinical spaces such as schools, offices, and family homes. Nick’s first phase of research shed light on how hypnotherapists were positioning themselves within Indonesia’s plural medical landscape, and the dynamics underpinning the speed of the nation’s ‘hypnosis boom’. This latter issue was explored within his article ‘Suggestions of Power’, which was awarded the 2019 Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology by SPA. 

He is now working on an ESRC-funded project to further understand the dynamics of Indonesia’s hypnosis boom and their implications for anthropological theories of therapeutic governance, symbolic healing, and the suggestive realm.