D M Knight
Biographic Data
| ID | 28390 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D M Knight |
| GIVEN NAMES | D M |
| FAMILY NAME | Knight |
| SIGNATURE | KNIGHT D M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9197-983X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
On the edge of the future
Automation anxiety is reshaping British game development at a moment when generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is being positioned as both creative catalyst and labour-displacing threat. Grounded in anthropology and in dialogue with social theory and memory studies, we examine how developers experience ‘life on the edge of time’ in a sector tasked with future-making amid intersecting constraints and expectations. Through ethnographic vignet…
Thumbelina’s Fury
Presenting three short vignettes from Scotland and Greece, this paper explores viable future-creation among youth encountering a world in polycrisis. Taking a conceptual lead from Michel Serres, it considers how the via (path) of βίος (life) is lined with generative βία (violence). The three scenes critique the indeterminacy of viable futures by considering the temporal depth of imagining the future, the technological platforms facilitating the a…
Angel Hair Anthropology with Michel Serres
The introduction argues for the advancement of anthropological theory through engagement with the work of Michel Serres. Particularly striking is the potentiality of porosity as a conceptual pivot to explore both Serres and ethnographic subjects. Touring Serres’s key works on time, religion, parasites, and ecology, the chapter argues that the porous becomings of interlocutors are best considered within the topological nexus of human–planetary con…
The Death of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
The paper offers a mutliscalar appreciation of vernacular cosmopolitanism as changing across space, time, and networks of relations. Drawing on observations from the UK and Greece, I argue for an expanded understanding of vernacular cosmopolitanism to incorporate everyday appreciations of multiculturalism, tolerance, and social liberalism that are produced within specific socio-historical contexts. Proposing a theory of ‘timespace’ where epochs a…
Polycrisis
Taking the realms of business, finance and economic history by storm, polycrisis captures the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world in a state of flux and transition. Proponents of the polycrisis model, such as prominent economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, propose polycrisis as a marker of our age, capturing overlapping and interconnected crises beyond cause and effect. In his article, the authors offer …
The possibility of possibility
This paper considers how ‘the possibility of possibility’ as freedom of choice and audacious obligation towards newness found in philosophical works of such scholars as Søren Kierkegaard and Michel Serres is tempered by socio-historical circumstance. Ethnographic material from Scotland and Greece demonstrates contrasting ways that possibilities are impacted by the various timespaces that open or foreclose pathways to the future. Possibility shape…
Animating Irony
Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements - from BlackLivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post-crash poli…
Vertigo and Urgency
Crisis provokes a sense of urgency often experienced as vertigo - the intense disorientation as to where and when one belongs on the temporal timeline of pasts and futures. The nauseating affects of urgency can be located in both crisis as sudden rupture and as chronic condition - the former a cliff-edge moment where a schism in historical continuity induces dizziness and a sense of falling, the latter defined by inescapability and suffocating ca…
Speculation
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Anthropology of the Future
Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail pl…
The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece
Associated with notions of family continuity, lineage, national belonging, and cultural roots, in Greece property inheritance was once highly desired. Yet, in recent years, there has been a rising trend of people wanting to be disinherited because of the economic burden of new taxes introduced as part of the international austerity program and the need to focus all resources on the short-term future of the immediate family. The desire for disinhe…
Fossilized Futures
Drawing on ethnography from western Thessaly, this article reassesses notions of time and temporality in the Greek economic crisis. People experience the past as a folded assemblage of linearly distant and sometimes contradictory moments that help them make sense of a period of social change. Anthropologists should embrace the paradoxes of (poly)temporality and address the topological/topographical experience of time and history. During an era of…
Energy Talk, Temporality, and Belonging in Austerity Greece
Dramatic changes in the energy landscape provide a lens through which to understand local perceptions of temporality, modernity, and belonging in austerity Greece. Re-launched in 2011, the European Union supported solar energy initiative encourages installation of futuristic, high-tech photovoltaic panels on fertile agricultural land. However, winter 2012-13 and 2013-14 witnessed a return en-masse to open-fires and wood-burning stoves as a means …
Anxiety and cosmopolitan futures
Two themes, temporality and cosmopolitanism, repeatedly arose during conversations in Scotland with people who favored remaining in the European Union. The 2016 referendum's result in favor leaving the EU has affected how they think about their temporal trajectories and what they might do to maintain their cosmopolitan ideals, which are now deeply shaken. Both Scots and non-UK EU nationals living in Scotland must confront the uncertainty of what …
The green economy as a sustainable alternative
This article explores the green economy as a sustainable alternative to austerity in Greece. The author argues that the movement towards the green economy has been hijacked by multinational corporations taking advantage of an austerity-era policy that encourages a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short-term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast 'crisis' as an incubator of…
Alternatives to austerity
We are in the age of austerity. Across the globe, there have recently been calls from both the left and the right to rethink policies of austerity and to rein in the forces of globalization. Over the past two years, anti-austerity sentiment has been a major factor in public votes in Europe and the US. Anti-globalization, anti-debt and anti-PPP movements are gaining broad support. Claiming to speak for ordinary families hit by the effects of auste…
Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece by Charles Stewart
Ethnographies of Austerity
This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may b…
History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece
History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece examines a period when nearly three decades of Greek economic prosperity were suddenly replaced by austerity, crisis, and destitution. Through detailed ethnographic and historical data collected over a decade of fieldwork in the central Greek town of Trikala, Knight paints a vivid picture of a landmark event in modern European socio-political history. Living with the consequences of internation…
Sun, wind, and the rebirth of extractive economies
In the midst of economic crisis, the Greek state has taken the unprecedented step of opening many of the nation's closed business sectors to international investors. Opportunities for multinational investment have been most prolific in the arena of renewable energy, where foreign prospecting in solar and wind energy is soaring. This article discusses two renewable energy initiatives: photovoltaic parks on agricultural land in Thessaly, central ma…
Wit and Greece's economic crisis
Ironic slogans voice opposition to neoliberal austerity measures as people in western Thessaly, Greece, strive to account for dramatically increasing poverty and cultivate a sense of collective suffering in an era of economic crisis. The slogans are pinned to moments of socioeconomic turmoil in recent Greek history, such as the 1941-43 famine and the 1973 polytechnic uprising against military dictatorship. Through satire, they capture local and n…
No Billionaire Left Behind
Opportunism and Diversification
As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood …
Mushrooms, Knowledge Exchange and Polytemporality in Kalloni, Greek Macedonia
Each autumn, the village of Kalloni in Greek Macedonia is woken from its usual seasonal slumber by groups of mushroom hunters. Since the former inhabitants migrated to surrounding towns during the 1940s, Kalloni has gradually become deserted outside of the summer months. The mushroom-picking season ignites dormant social networks of embodied knowledge and history. Mushrooms facilitate a polytemporal link to historical and sensory experience and a…
The Greek economic crisis as trope
The Greek economic crisis resonates across Europe as synonymous with corruption, poor government, austerity, financial bailouts, civil unrest, and social turmoil. The search for accountability on the local level is entangled with competing rhetorics of persuasion, fear, and complex historical consciousness. Internationally, the Greek crisis is employed as a trope to call for collective mobilization and political change. Drawing on ethnographic re…
Ethnographies of Austerity
This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may b…
Cultural Proximity
In Trikala, central Greece, specific historical events significantly inform understandings of the present economic crisis through what is termed "cultural proximity". This is the notion that previous times of social and economic turmoil, apparently distant points in time, are embodied within the context of the present. Some past epochs of prosperity and crisis have proved more significant than others in shaping contemporary crisis experience. As …
Sun, wind, and the rebirth of extractive economies
In the midst of economic crisis, the Greek state has taken the unprecedented step of opening many of the nation's closed business sectors to international investors. Opportunities for multinational investment have been most prolific in the arena of renewable energy, where foreign prospecting in solar and wind energy is soaring. This article discusses two renewable energy initiatives: photovoltaic parks on agricultural land in Thessaly, central ma…
Wit and Greece's economic crisis
Ironic slogans voice opposition to neoliberal austerity measures as people in western Thessaly, Greece, strive to account for dramatically increasing poverty and cultivate a sense of collective suffering in an era of economic crisis. The slogans are pinned to moments of socioeconomic turmoil in recent Greek history, such as the 1941-43 famine and the 1973 polytechnic uprising against military dictatorship. Through satire, they capture local and n…
Anxiety and cosmopolitan futures
Two themes, temporality and cosmopolitanism, repeatedly arose during conversations in Scotland with people who favored remaining in the European Union. The 2016 referendum's result in favor leaving the EU has affected how they think about their temporal trajectories and what they might do to maintain their cosmopolitan ideals, which are now deeply shaken. Both Scots and non-UK EU nationals living in Scotland must confront the uncertainty of what …
The Greek economic crisis as trope
The Greek economic crisis resonates across Europe as synonymous with corruption, poor government, austerity, financial bailouts, civil unrest, and social turmoil. The search for accountability on the local level is entangled with competing rhetorics of persuasion, fear, and complex historical consciousness. Internationally, the Greek crisis is employed as a trope to call for collective mobilization and political change. Drawing on ethnographic re…
Opportunism and Diversification
As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood …
Energy Talk, Temporality, and Belonging in Austerity Greece
Dramatic changes in the energy landscape provide a lens through which to understand local perceptions of temporality, modernity, and belonging in austerity Greece. Re-launched in 2011, the European Union supported solar energy initiative encourages installation of futuristic, high-tech photovoltaic panels on fertile agricultural land. However, winter 2012-13 and 2013-14 witnessed a return en-masse to open-fires and wood-burning stoves as a means …
The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece
Associated with notions of family continuity, lineage, national belonging, and cultural roots, in Greece property inheritance was once highly desired. Yet, in recent years, there has been a rising trend of people wanting to be disinherited because of the economic burden of new taxes introduced as part of the international austerity program and the need to focus all resources on the short-term future of the immediate family. The desire for disinhe…
Alternatives to austerity
We are in the age of austerity. Across the globe, there have recently been calls from both the left and the right to rethink policies of austerity and to rein in the forces of globalization. Over the past two years, anti-austerity sentiment has been a major factor in public votes in Europe and the US. Anti-globalization, anti-debt and anti-PPP movements are gaining broad support. Claiming to speak for ordinary families hit by the effects of auste…
The green economy as a sustainable alternative
This article explores the green economy as a sustainable alternative to austerity in Greece. The author argues that the movement towards the green economy has been hijacked by multinational corporations taking advantage of an austerity-era policy that encourages a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short-term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast 'crisis' as an incubator of…
The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement
The Death of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
The paper offers a mutliscalar appreciation of vernacular cosmopolitanism as changing across space, time, and networks of relations. Drawing on observations from the UK and Greece, I argue for an expanded understanding of vernacular cosmopolitanism to incorporate everyday appreciations of multiculturalism, tolerance, and social liberalism that are produced within specific socio-historical contexts. Proposing a theory of ‘timespace’ where epochs a…
Vertigo and Urgency
Crisis provokes a sense of urgency often experienced as vertigo - the intense disorientation as to where and when one belongs on the temporal timeline of pasts and futures. The nauseating affects of urgency can be located in both crisis as sudden rupture and as chronic condition - the former a cliff-edge moment where a schism in historical continuity induces dizziness and a sense of falling, the latter defined by inescapability and suffocating ca…
Essay Review
The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement
History of Science in Durham Libraries
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Cultural Proximity
In Trikala, central Greece, specific historical events significantly inform understandings of the present economic crisis through what is termed "cultural proximity". This is the notion that previous times of social and economic turmoil, apparently distant points in time, are embodied within the context of the present. Some past epochs of prosperity and crisis have proved more significant than others in shaping contemporary crisis experience. As …
The Greek economic crisis as trope
The Greek economic crisis resonates across Europe as synonymous with corruption, poor government, austerity, financial bailouts, civil unrest, and social turmoil. The search for accountability on the local level is entangled with competing rhetorics of persuasion, fear, and complex historical consciousness. Internationally, the Greek crisis is employed as a trope to call for collective mobilization and political change. Drawing on ethnographic re…
Mushrooms, Knowledge Exchange and Polytemporality in Kalloni, Greek Macedonia
Each autumn, the village of Kalloni in Greek Macedonia is woken from its usual seasonal slumber by groups of mushroom hunters. Since the former inhabitants migrated to surrounding towns during the 1940s, Kalloni has gradually become deserted outside of the summer months. The mushroom-picking season ignites dormant social networks of embodied knowledge and history. Mushrooms facilitate a polytemporal link to historical and sensory experience and a…
History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece
History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece examines a period when nearly three decades of Greek economic prosperity were suddenly replaced by austerity, crisis, and destitution. Through detailed ethnographic and historical data collected over a decade of fieldwork in the central Greek town of Trikala, Knight paints a vivid picture of a landmark event in modern European socio-political history. Living with the consequences of internation…
Sun, wind, and the rebirth of extractive economies
In the midst of economic crisis, the Greek state has taken the unprecedented step of opening many of the nation's closed business sectors to international investors. Opportunities for multinational investment have been most prolific in the arena of renewable energy, where foreign prospecting in solar and wind energy is soaring. This article discusses two renewable energy initiatives: photovoltaic parks on agricultural land in Thessaly, central ma…
Wit and Greece's economic crisis
Ironic slogans voice opposition to neoliberal austerity measures as people in western Thessaly, Greece, strive to account for dramatically increasing poverty and cultivate a sense of collective suffering in an era of economic crisis. The slogans are pinned to moments of socioeconomic turmoil in recent Greek history, such as the 1941-43 famine and the 1973 polytechnic uprising against military dictatorship. Through satire, they capture local and n…
No Billionaire Left Behind
Opportunism and Diversification
As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood …
Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece by Charles Stewart
Ethnographies of Austerity
This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may b…
Fossilized Futures
Drawing on ethnography from western Thessaly, this article reassesses notions of time and temporality in the Greek economic crisis. People experience the past as a folded assemblage of linearly distant and sometimes contradictory moments that help them make sense of a period of social change. Anthropologists should embrace the paradoxes of (poly)temporality and address the topological/topographical experience of time and history. During an era of…
Energy Talk, Temporality, and Belonging in Austerity Greece
Dramatic changes in the energy landscape provide a lens through which to understand local perceptions of temporality, modernity, and belonging in austerity Greece. Re-launched in 2011, the European Union supported solar energy initiative encourages installation of futuristic, high-tech photovoltaic panels on fertile agricultural land. However, winter 2012-13 and 2013-14 witnessed a return en-masse to open-fires and wood-burning stoves as a means …
Anxiety and cosmopolitan futures
Two themes, temporality and cosmopolitanism, repeatedly arose during conversations in Scotland with people who favored remaining in the European Union. The 2016 referendum's result in favor leaving the EU has affected how they think about their temporal trajectories and what they might do to maintain their cosmopolitan ideals, which are now deeply shaken. Both Scots and non-UK EU nationals living in Scotland must confront the uncertainty of what …
The green economy as a sustainable alternative
This article explores the green economy as a sustainable alternative to austerity in Greece. The author argues that the movement towards the green economy has been hijacked by multinational corporations taking advantage of an austerity-era policy that encourages a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short-term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast 'crisis' as an incubator of…
Alternatives to austerity
We are in the age of austerity. Across the globe, there have recently been calls from both the left and the right to rethink policies of austerity and to rein in the forces of globalization. Over the past two years, anti-austerity sentiment has been a major factor in public votes in Europe and the US. Anti-globalization, anti-debt and anti-PPP movements are gaining broad support. Claiming to speak for ordinary families hit by the effects of auste…
The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece
Associated with notions of family continuity, lineage, national belonging, and cultural roots, in Greece property inheritance was once highly desired. Yet, in recent years, there has been a rising trend of people wanting to be disinherited because of the economic burden of new taxes introduced as part of the international austerity program and the need to focus all resources on the short-term future of the immediate family. The desire for disinhe…
Speculation
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Anthropology of the Future
Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail pl…
Vertigo and Urgency
Crisis provokes a sense of urgency often experienced as vertigo - the intense disorientation as to where and when one belongs on the temporal timeline of pasts and futures. The nauseating affects of urgency can be located in both crisis as sudden rupture and as chronic condition - the former a cliff-edge moment where a schism in historical continuity induces dizziness and a sense of falling, the latter defined by inescapability and suffocating ca…
Polycrisis
Taking the realms of business, finance and economic history by storm, polycrisis captures the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world in a state of flux and transition. Proponents of the polycrisis model, such as prominent economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, propose polycrisis as a marker of our age, capturing overlapping and interconnected crises beyond cause and effect. In his article, the authors offer …
The possibility of possibility
This paper considers how ‘the possibility of possibility’ as freedom of choice and audacious obligation towards newness found in philosophical works of such scholars as Søren Kierkegaard and Michel Serres is tempered by socio-historical circumstance. Ethnographic material from Scotland and Greece demonstrates contrasting ways that possibilities are impacted by the various timespaces that open or foreclose pathways to the future. Possibility shape…
Animating Irony
Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements - from BlackLivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post-crash poli…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · History (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)