Catherine Alexander
Biographic Data
| ID | 3580952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Alexander |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Alexander |
| SIGNATURE | ALEXANDER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4091-0407 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 202 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Anthropology and absurdity: Introduction
Suspending failure: Temporalities, Ontologies, and Gigantism in Fusion Energy Development
Tracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re‐evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how this vast enterprise, dogged by failure, endures, I suggest that different ontological narratives re‐orientate the enterprise both temporally and vis‐à‐vis different forms and valences of failure. Thus t…
Writing failure: Knowledge Production, Temporalities, Ethics, and Traces
This volume follows failures out into the world, exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives, and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted - unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate, and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode of uncontainable excess that refuses the bound…
A Chronotope of Expansion: Resisting Spatio-temporal Limits in a Kazakh Nuclear Town
This article starts by anatomising the various strategies used by the Soviet regime to contain and 'disappear' the nuclear weapon test site in Kazakhstan before moving on to outline attempts by the independent Republic of Kazakshtan's National Nuclear Centre (NNC) to be more open-including making much of the site available for commercial and agricultural use, after 25 years of remediation and monitoring. Juxtaposing these strategies with accounts…
Waste and Its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)Knowing
The introduction to this special issue starts with a brief thematisation of the key theoretical interventions in the anthropology of waste in order to situate our own contribution. We follow this by discussing, and adding to the recent anthropology and sociology of ignorance and not knowing, before turning to the intersections between waste and ignorance, thinking through how we and other scholars have theorised ways of deflecting attention away …
Thrift and Its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy
The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate
This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelianoikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retracti…
Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice
In line with rising public and policy concern about wastes, there has been a distinct rise in scholarly analyses of these and other developments associated with economies of recycling, focusing especially on people’s material and moral encounters with reuse. These range from nuanced investigations into how lives and materials can both be re-crafted by recovering value from discards; following an object through its many social lives; or focusing o…
Charity and Philanthropy
Anthropological analyses of charity are often based on Maussian theories of gift exchange and inequalities between donor and recipient, sometimes compounded by spectacular displays of giving or by aid, both humanitarian and faith‐based, from the global North to the South. Other accounts complicate this understanding, variously showing the charitable gift as the recipient's right or considering charitable work as a technology of self care. The con…
Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination
What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnogra…
Homeless in the homeland: Housing protests in Kazakhstan
This article tracks housing protests in Kazakhstan's former capital city, Almaty, from 1989 to 2016 for what they reveal about shifting ideas of rights and obligations between citizens and state. Three broad models of moral economies of housing emerge: the first, during the Soviet period, where equal access to housing was nominally in return for labour; the second, during the early Republican period when pro-Kazakh policies favoured previously ma…
Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing
Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their deman…
The meeting as subjunctive form: Public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies
Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in such meetings. Meetings held in the Turkish senior government bureaucracy did not conform to expectation: they embraced formal and informal relations and were spectacles and tournaments of skill. I su…
Central Asia, Anthropology of
From Biopower to Energopolitics in England's Modern Waste Technology
Two energy-generating technologies in Britain which transform waste into a resource are compared. One is the (in)famous Combined Heat and Power incinerator in Sheffield, the other a forgotten biological digester in Devon utilizing anaerobic microbes. Both sites are early exemplars of experimental and biopolitical waste disposal technologies-incineration and anaerobic digestion-now regarded as leading alternatives for reducing the United Kingdom's…
Economies of Recycling: The global transformation of materials, values and social relations
For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralized way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analyzed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Recycling Economies radically changes the way …
Mobile nostalgias: Connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex‐residents
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias…
One homeland or two? The nationalization and transnationalization of Mongolia's Kazakhs
Politics, mobility and nationhood: Upscaling young people's geographies: introduction to Special Section
As noted by Vanderbeck (2008), recent years have seen a sharp increase in scholarship about what has come to be known as ‘children's geographies’, helped by the regular publication of the journal of the same name. This rich and important work is continuing to develop, yet relatively less is being said about the complex geographies of young people's lives (exceptions being Aitken 2001; Hopkins 2010; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Clearly there are s…
Illusions of freedom: Polanyi and the third sector
Introduction This chapter is concerned with understanding the recent prominence of the third sector in British public policy and the light such an analysis sheds over neoliberalism's current form. Through two ethnographic studies of community recycling schemes I examine the divergence between the public rhetoric of freeing society from statist intervention and the practice of entangling third-sector groups into contractual relationships with the …
Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today
Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, offered a radical critique of how the market system has affected society and humanity since the industrial revolution. This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in economic anthropology, sociology and political economy to consider Polanyi's theories in the light of circumstances today, when the relationship between market and society has again become a focus of intens…
Books and Conferences
BOOKS Postage, J. N. (ed.) (2007), Languages of Iraq: Ancient and Modern (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq). ix + 187 pp., figs. ISBN. 978-0-903472-21-0. £15.00. Reid, Donald Malcom (2002), Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press). ix + 409 pp., 46 illus. ISBN 0520240693. $21.95. Vivier-Muresan, Anne-Sophie (2006), Afzad: Ethnologie d’…
Soviet and Post-Soviet Planning in Almaty, Kazakhstan
■ Through the case study of Soviet and post-Soviet Almaty (the former capital of Kazakhstan), this article considers how the idea of rational planning was bolstered in the Soviet era by a belief in universalizing approaches and the primacy of scientific truth over local ethics and knowledge. However, in practice, plans were rarely implemented. A succession of contingent events left city officials caught between an immediate necessity for basic sh…
The cultures and properties of decaying buildings
This article focuses on controversial plans by the government to rebuild Aisha Bibi, a small, crumbling mausoleum in southeastern Kazakhstan, and thereby hitch its symbolic potency to the nationalist drive. There has never been one commonly accepted account of the building in terms of when and by whom it was created. Nonetheless, it has long been a site of pilgrimage for many different groups and, since the Soviet period, a source of scientific i…
Who Owns Native Culture
Who Owns Native Culture? Michael Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004
Mobile nostalgias: Connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex‐residents
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias…
Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing
Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their deman…
Waste and Its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)Knowing
The introduction to this special issue starts with a brief thematisation of the key theoretical interventions in the anthropology of waste in order to situate our own contribution. We follow this by discussing, and adding to the recent anthropology and sociology of ignorance and not knowing, before turning to the intersections between waste and ignorance, thinking through how we and other scholars have theorised ways of deflecting attention away …
Writing failure: Knowledge Production, Temporalities, Ethics, and Traces
This volume follows failures out into the world, exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives, and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted - unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate, and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode of uncontainable excess that refuses the bound…
From Biopower to Energopolitics in England's Modern Waste Technology
Two energy-generating technologies in Britain which transform waste into a resource are compared. One is the (in)famous Combined Heat and Power incinerator in Sheffield, the other a forgotten biological digester in Devon utilizing anaerobic microbes. Both sites are early exemplars of experimental and biopolitical waste disposal technologies-incineration and anaerobic digestion-now regarded as leading alternatives for reducing the United Kingdom's…
Politics, mobility and nationhood: Upscaling young people's geographies: introduction to Special Section
As noted by Vanderbeck (2008), recent years have seen a sharp increase in scholarship about what has come to be known as ‘children's geographies’, helped by the regular publication of the journal of the same name. This rich and important work is continuing to develop, yet relatively less is being said about the complex geographies of young people's lives (exceptions being Aitken 2001; Hopkins 2010; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Clearly there are s…
A Chronotope of Expansion: Resisting Spatio-temporal Limits in a Kazakh Nuclear Town
This article starts by anatomising the various strategies used by the Soviet regime to contain and 'disappear' the nuclear weapon test site in Kazakhstan before moving on to outline attempts by the independent Republic of Kazakshtan's National Nuclear Centre (NNC) to be more open-including making much of the site available for commercial and agricultural use, after 25 years of remediation and monitoring. Juxtaposing these strategies with accounts…
The meeting as subjunctive form: Public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies
Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in such meetings. Meetings held in the Turkish senior government bureaucracy did not conform to expectation: they embraced formal and informal relations and were spectacles and tournaments of skill. I su…
Soviet and Post-Soviet Planning in Almaty, Kazakhstan
■ Through the case study of Soviet and post-Soviet Almaty (the former capital of Kazakhstan), this article considers how the idea of rational planning was bolstered in the Soviet era by a belief in universalizing approaches and the primacy of scientific truth over local ethics and knowledge. However, in practice, plans were rarely implemented. A succession of contingent events left city officials caught between an immediate necessity for basic sh…
Homeless in the homeland: Housing protests in Kazakhstan
This article tracks housing protests in Kazakhstan's former capital city, Almaty, from 1989 to 2016 for what they reveal about shifting ideas of rights and obligations between citizens and state. Three broad models of moral economies of housing emerge: the first, during the Soviet period, where equal access to housing was nominally in return for labour; the second, during the early Republican period when pro-Kazakh policies favoured previously ma…
Legal and Binding: Time, Change and Long-Term Transactions
This article explores the question of how long-term transactional agreements endure when the environment in which they exist is necessarily subject to change. Different models of connection are examined, including the classical model of freedom of contract. It appears that contracts in practice do not substantiate ideas of free choice and equal bargaining power. Instead, the symbolic power of contracts, as a means of conjoining parties and openin…
Suspending failure: Temporalities, Ontologies, and Gigantism in Fusion Energy Development
Tracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re‐evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how this vast enterprise, dogged by failure, endures, I suggest that different ontological narratives re‐orientate the enterprise both temporally and vis‐à‐vis different forms and valences of failure. Thus t…
The Factory: Fabricating the State
This article considers the Turkish State's use of the built environment to mould behaviour and how local practices modify such architectonic command sequences. Specifically, the Turkish Sugar Corporation from its inception to the present day is analysed, through the prism of the architecture of factory compounds. Through the fourfold structure of 'form', 'practice', 'building' and 'setting', the changing relationship between Republican centralist…
The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate
This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelianoikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retracti…
One homeland or two? The nationalization and transnationalization of Mongolia's Kazakhs
The cultures and properties of decaying buildings
This article focuses on controversial plans by the government to rebuild Aisha Bibi, a small, crumbling mausoleum in southeastern Kazakhstan, and thereby hitch its symbolic potency to the nationalist drive. There has never been one commonly accepted account of the building in terms of when and by whom it was created. Nonetheless, it has long been a site of pilgrimage for many different groups and, since the Soviet period, a source of scientific i…
The Factory: Fabricating the State
This article considers the Turkish State's use of the built environment to mould behaviour and how local practices modify such architectonic command sequences. Specifically, the Turkish Sugar Corporation from its inception to the present day is analysed, through the prism of the architecture of factory compounds. Through the fourfold structure of 'form', 'practice', 'building' and 'setting', the changing relationship between Republican centralist…
Legal and Binding: Time, Change and Long-Term Transactions
This article explores the question of how long-term transactional agreements endure when the environment in which they exist is necessarily subject to change. Different models of connection are examined, including the classical model of freedom of contract. It appears that contracts in practice do not substantiate ideas of free choice and equal bargaining power. Instead, the symbolic power of contracts, as a means of conjoining parties and openin…
The Garden as Occasional Domestic Space
Social Anthropology
The cultures and properties of decaying buildings
This article focuses on controversial plans by the government to rebuild Aisha Bibi, a small, crumbling mausoleum in southeastern Kazakhstan, and thereby hitch its symbolic potency to the nationalist drive. There has never been one commonly accepted account of the building in terms of when and by whom it was created. Nonetheless, it has long been a site of pilgrimage for many different groups and, since the Soviet period, a source of scientific i…
Who Owns Native Culture
Who Owns Native Culture? Michael Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004
Soviet and Post-Soviet Planning in Almaty, Kazakhstan
■ Through the case study of Soviet and post-Soviet Almaty (the former capital of Kazakhstan), this article considers how the idea of rational planning was bolstered in the Soviet era by a belief in universalizing approaches and the primacy of scientific truth over local ethics and knowledge. However, in practice, plans were rarely implemented. A succession of contingent events left city officials caught between an immediate necessity for basic sh…
Books and Conferences
BOOKS Postage, J. N. (ed.) (2007), Languages of Iraq: Ancient and Modern (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq). ix + 187 pp., figs. ISBN. 978-0-903472-21-0. £15.00. Reid, Donald Malcom (2002), Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press). ix + 409 pp., 46 illus. ISBN 0520240693. $21.95. Vivier-Muresan, Anne-Sophie (2006), Afzad: Ethnologie d’…
Illusions of freedom: Polanyi and the third sector
Introduction This chapter is concerned with understanding the recent prominence of the third sector in British public policy and the light such an analysis sheds over neoliberalism's current form. Through two ethnographic studies of community recycling schemes I examine the divergence between the public rhetoric of freeing society from statist intervention and the practice of entangling third-sector groups into contractual relationships with the …
Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today
Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, offered a radical critique of how the market system has affected society and humanity since the industrial revolution. This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in economic anthropology, sociology and political economy to consider Polanyi's theories in the light of circumstances today, when the relationship between market and society has again become a focus of intens…
One homeland or two? The nationalization and transnationalization of Mongolia's Kazakhs
Politics, mobility and nationhood: Upscaling young people's geographies: introduction to Special Section
As noted by Vanderbeck (2008), recent years have seen a sharp increase in scholarship about what has come to be known as ‘children's geographies’, helped by the regular publication of the journal of the same name. This rich and important work is continuing to develop, yet relatively less is being said about the complex geographies of young people's lives (exceptions being Aitken 2001; Hopkins 2010; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Clearly there are s…
Economies of Recycling: The global transformation of materials, values and social relations
For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralized way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analyzed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Recycling Economies radically changes the way …
Mobile nostalgias: Connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex‐residents
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias…
From Biopower to Energopolitics in England's Modern Waste Technology
Two energy-generating technologies in Britain which transform waste into a resource are compared. One is the (in)famous Combined Heat and Power incinerator in Sheffield, the other a forgotten biological digester in Devon utilizing anaerobic microbes. Both sites are early exemplars of experimental and biopolitical waste disposal technologies-incineration and anaerobic digestion-now regarded as leading alternatives for reducing the United Kingdom's…
Central Asia, Anthropology of
The meeting as subjunctive form: Public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies
Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in such meetings. Meetings held in the Turkish senior government bureaucracy did not conform to expectation: they embraced formal and informal relations and were spectacles and tournaments of skill. I su…
Charity and Philanthropy
Anthropological analyses of charity are often based on Maussian theories of gift exchange and inequalities between donor and recipient, sometimes compounded by spectacular displays of giving or by aid, both humanitarian and faith‐based, from the global North to the South. Other accounts complicate this understanding, variously showing the charitable gift as the recipient's right or considering charitable work as a technology of self care. The con…
Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination
What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnogra…
Homeless in the homeland: Housing protests in Kazakhstan
This article tracks housing protests in Kazakhstan's former capital city, Almaty, from 1989 to 2016 for what they reveal about shifting ideas of rights and obligations between citizens and state. Three broad models of moral economies of housing emerge: the first, during the Soviet period, where equal access to housing was nominally in return for labour; the second, during the early Republican period when pro-Kazakh policies favoured previously ma…
Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing
Struggles over housing are one of the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time. Yet questions over access to, plus the redistribution and maintenance of secure housing have only recently begun to be considered anthropologically. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of moral economy, this special issue addresses these questions and considers how contemporary moral economies of housing play out. Citizens try to make their deman…
Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice
In line with rising public and policy concern about wastes, there has been a distinct rise in scholarly analyses of these and other developments associated with economies of recycling, focusing especially on people’s material and moral encounters with reuse. These range from nuanced investigations into how lives and materials can both be re-crafted by recovering value from discards; following an object through its many social lives; or focusing o…
Thrift and Its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy
The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate
This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelianoikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retracti…
Suspending failure: Temporalities, Ontologies, and Gigantism in Fusion Energy Development
Tracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re‐evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how this vast enterprise, dogged by failure, endures, I suggest that different ontological narratives re‐orientate the enterprise both temporally and vis‐à‐vis different forms and valences of failure. Thus t…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works)