Emma Crewe
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 93440 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Emma Crewe |
| PRENOMES | Emma |
| SOBRENOME | Crewe |
| ASSINATURA | CREWE E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0109-219X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 119 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
A Lone Star and The City on The Hill
Elected politicians in Texas and Massachusetts tend to claim that both their states are exceptional, their legislatures advanced, and their democracies healthy. Despite having nearly identical governing institutions at the same time, Texas and Massachusetts have different legislative and political cultures that produce dramatically different laws and social outcomes, particularly around the issues of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. This …
Cooperation in Polarized Legislatures
Political work requires alliance building, but antagonism and divisions dominate legislatures and society in many democracies. How do legislators handle being pulled in both directions simultaneously? We use the anthropological method of ethnography and the political science method of network analysis and show how their combination enhances understanding of cross-party cooperation among Representatives even when such work is not depicted in the m…
A neo-complexity orientation to action research
The influence of complexity theory on action research scholarship and practice has been kaleidoscopic. Further integrating ideas derived from the complexity sciences could enrich this research tradition, but there are choices to be made about what to prioritise. We distinguish complexity-informed approaches that privilege control from those adopting radical open-endedness. The former often aligns with managerialist assumptions, which tend to deny…
Ethnography in the plural
Developments in qualitative research have increasingly recognized the value of modes of ethnographic inquiry that go beyond the conventional model of the lone ethnographer. Many examples involve parallel, collaborative enquiry in which ethnographers come together around frameworks, share data and collaborate in analysis - rather than working as a collective throughout the research process, including fieldwork, what we refer to here as 'collective…
The political lives of postwar British MPs
Oral historians share elements in common with some ethnographers in that they tend to undersell their own theory of method. Peplow and Pivatto write in The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs: P
Parliamentary standards under attack
Healthy democracies require ethical leadership and respect for rules, but since the 2000s we have witnessed serious attacks on standards in the UK Parliament. Two narratives about scandals will reveal cultural and social aspects that are often ignored by the public, journalists and parliamentary scholars. A slow development of conditions led to a scandal over misuse of expenses in 2009, while rule-breaking in Parliament during Prime Minister John…
Global partnerships on paper and in practice
This article describes the bureaucratic processes required to establish and manage a single international capacity‐development project that brought together a funding council (AHRC), UK University (SOAS University of London) and universities and other research organisations in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Drawing from ethnographic critiques of the planning and audit practices employed in international development and in the UK University sector, we trac…
The Future of Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Emma Crewe, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Shane Martin discuss the future of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
ThePresentof Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Emma Crewe and Shane Martin discuss the present of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
ThePastof Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Shane Martin, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Emma Crewe discuss the past of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
The sociality of parliaments
Rituals and symbols in politics
Ritual is conceived of as indispensable to religious and royal occasions but tangential to politics by scholars and participants alike. Five distinct kinds of ritual tend be required to make politics work: elections, conferences, informal meetings, decision-making and ceremonies of state. This chapter focuses on parliamentary decision-making and ceremonies of state, before returning to broader questions about political ritual. Ritual can only be …
Improvising together
Social anthropology has variously described itself as a science, a social science and a humanity over the years, emerging with a different way of describing itself in the US and Europe. But there appears to be a general agreement in contemporary debates that anthropology is found at the intersection of all three, even if the personal inclination is towards the humanities. The process of anthropological research is iterative and emergent because t…
Scrutiny of the state
Scrutiny of the state, in the sense of critical examination and questioning, is seen as vital to a healthy democracy. Anthropologists point to the blurring and entanglement between the state and other parts of society, as well as other states. The state is not the discrete system sometimes portrayed by political scientists or policy / public administration scholars: it is entangled, dynamic and unpredictable. This chapter offers two narratives on…
The alchemy of voting
Elections are ‘a happy synthesis of liberation and revenge, secured in the ideal case without either bloodshed or massive public disorder; all the conveniences of revolution, without any of the inconveniences.’ Political scientists focus on what influences people’s votes or choices, or predicting and analysing results, but there is also much to be said about what voting means and does to relationships between people. It is not just the result tha…
A sense of proportion
Politics involves strange processes of alchemy. Dials are useful for writing about democratic politics with a sense of proportion. Introducing the idea of ‘dials’ might force us to explain more systematically why specific relationships, processes or events are more significant than others. Politicians do politics with the dial turned up because they walk with even more friends and foes, and engage in more bitter power struggles, with more at stak…
Riffs of meaning
Politicians create ‘riffs’ to communicate their ideas, perhaps seven or eight at any one time, according to Chris Bryant, a British Labour Member of Parliament. Riffs are a good way to think about not just the continuities and breaks in ideology, but also the performance as well as the meaning of acts of communication. Riffs will be used on various occasions, whether in the chamber, in a media interview or in the constituency, so the style and te…
Introducing parliaments and anthropology
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes what anthropologists have written about parliaments so far and provoke questions for future research. It is divided in to three parts. The first is about how politics is entangled in sociality, the second grapples with culture and the third is about power and knowledge. The book relies on a partly conventional way of u…
Rhythms of performance
This chapter proposes a systematic and comparative approach to the study of politicians’ routines and rhythms. It explores that rhythms should be taken seriously partly because they offer some stability and continuity for politicians, and even for the rest of us in a less pronounced way, in their chaotic, contradictory and shape shifting work. The rhythms of parliamentary life need an inquiry into seasons, diaries and appointments observable in o…
Representing
Communication involves a subtler process whereby United States politicians spend time in their districts to measure and enhance their voting leeway. Representatives know that they will be required sometimes to vote against the wishes of their constituents. Political scientists have even undertaken participant-observation as politicians themselves. Central to feminism is the question of alignment or divergence between the interests of those repres…
The cultures of parliaments
The Anthropology of Parliaments
The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world.Crewe's insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions.She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are const…
Audit as political struggle
Auditing firms tend to promote rule-bound orthodoxies about management based on the fiction that the world is more predictable than it is. Managers in INGOs find that long-term planning requires endless readjustment. This article explores what happens when these conflicting knowledge regimes clash during auditing. It draws on Bourdieu’s ideas to illuminate how different forms of social capital come into play in conflicting versions of management …
An ethnography of parliamentary ethnographers
An ethnography of parliamentary ethnographers: riffs, rhythms and rituals in their researchSocial science has witnessed a growing respect towards ethnography albeit in an uneven way across regions and disciplines [1].The tolerance for ethnography in parliamentary studies seems to be far higher in the United Kingdom (UK) than in the USA, but perhaps less fulsome than it is in France (Rozenburg, 2018).This is hardly surprising as the first ethnogra…
The Silent Traditions of Developing Cooks
Stoves attracted a great deal of aid and attention, and many development agencies, government and non-government, became involved in their promotion. In the history of stoves until the late 1940s, technological development in the &s;South&s; took place either in kitchens, or occasionally in artisan&s;s workshops, largely as a part of commercial enterprise. The perception that the demand for fuelwood was outstripping supply in &s;developing countr…
The Anthropology of Parliaments
The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world.Crewe's insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions.She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are const…
The elephant in the room
Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized representations of ‘racial’groups are pervasive and can be trivial in impact. But when combined with exclusionary social networks and rituals, and used to …
Ethnography of Parliament
Ethnographic approaches are beginning to percolate through political science, but are often taken up as a ‘method’, rather than an approach to methodology and theory. I describe my experience of doing ethnography in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Through the themes of whipping and gender, I explain how theory and method were interwoven and how reflexivity improves rigour. Dealing with the methodological challenge of disjunctions and contradicti…
Ethnographies of parliament
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges, advantages and limits of ethnographical approaches to the study of parliament. Challenges in the study of political institutions emerge because they can be fast-changing, difficult to gain access to, have starkly contrasting public and private faces and, in the case of national parliaments, are intimately connected to rest of the nation.Design/methodology/approachEthnography usually …
Ethnographic Research in Gendered Organizations
Anthropologists and new institutionalist scholars studying politics share an interest in rules, norms, and power. The former tend to agree more closely with those researchers who rely on inductive empiricism rather than deductive research methods, take an historical perspective, and treat ambiguities as part of the study rather than an inconvenience. As Olivier de Sardan argues, those institutionalist approaches that tend to rely on abstract, pre…
An Anthropology of the House of Lords
This study addresses the puzzle of conformity in the House of Lords; why do any peers attend regularly and usually obey their party whip? Rational choice theory struggles to explain this when you bear in mind that peers tend to be unambitious and do not rely on re-election to stay in parliament. The reasons can be found in a close study of their culture and social relationships; in particular in (a) socialisation in the Lords, (b) the social stat…
Chairing UK Select Committees
In this article, we aim to look at the political, social and emotional world created by the UK’s House of Commons select committees and the part played by their chairs. Drawing upon the theoretical traditions of political anthropology (Spencer (2004, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)), group analytical theory (Foulkes (1948, Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and P…
Gujurati migrants' search for modernity in Britain
If people stay in one place there is no progress' T he stories were collected as part of a research project which was a response to some puzzling fin din gs whi ch emerged during earlier rese arch by Uma Kothari in India in 1986 88. Despite their prosperity, farming households had family members living abroad either in the UK or East Africa, and those remaining had submitted visa applications and were waiting to migrate to Brit ain. Many of them …
An ethnography of parliamentary ethnographers
An ethnography of parliamentary ethnographers: riffs, rhythms and rituals in their researchSocial science has witnessed a growing respect towards ethnography albeit in an uneven way across regions and disciplines [1].The tolerance for ethnography in parliamentary studies seems to be far higher in the United Kingdom (UK) than in the USA, but perhaps less fulsome than it is in France (Rozenburg, 2018).This is hardly surprising as the first ethnogra…
Doing development differently
Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights refo…
Parliamentary Socialisation
Parliamentary Socialisation: Learning the Ropes or Determining Behaviour? by Michael Rush and Philip Giddings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. xvii + 266. £57.50, hb. ISBN: 9780230284890
Parliamentary standards under attack
Healthy democracies require ethical leadership and respect for rules, but since the 2000s we have witnessed serious attacks on standards in the UK Parliament. Two narratives about scandals will reveal cultural and social aspects that are often ignored by the public, journalists and parliamentary scholars. A slow development of conditions led to a scandal over misuse of expenses in 2009, while rule-breaking in Parliament during Prime Minister John…
The Future of Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Emma Crewe, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Shane Martin discuss the future of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
ThePresentof Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Emma Crewe and Shane Martin discuss the present of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
ThePastof Parliamentary and Legislative Studies
In this article, Shane Martin, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson and Emma Crewe discuss the past of parliamentary and legislative studies. The exchange is based on a Roundtable on the past, present and future of parliamentary studies, which was held online on 9 June 2021 as part of the Annual Conference of the UK Political Studies Association’s Parliaments Specialist Group
Flagships and tumbleweed
This article contributes to scholarship on the political nature of feminists’ work in international development NGOs. The case study of Oxfam GB (OGB) is contemporary history, based on compiling a brief history of gender justice work between 1986 and 2014 and 18 months of part-time participant-observation fieldwork during 2014–15. I describe funding pressures and imperatives, contestations of meaning and power struggles within OGB and argue that …
The Pleasure and Pain of Electioneering in the UK
Towards better outcomes for children globally
Contrary to prevailing wisdom, international development does not either succeed or fail. It does both. With reference to case study material gleaned from working with both grant‐makers and international civil society organisations, this article critiques both the assumptions and organisation of development. Development initiatives create small islands of beneficial change for children but in general suffer from donor‐led managerial approaches, t…
Gujurati migrants' search for modernity in Britain
If people stay in one place there is no progress' T he stories were collected as part of a research project which was a response to some puzzling fin din gs whi ch emerged during earlier rese arch by Uma Kothari in India in 1986 88. Despite their prosperity, farming households had family members living abroad either in the UK or East Africa, and those remaining had submitted visa applications and were waiting to migrate to Brit ain. Many of them …
The elephant in the room
Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized representations of ‘racial’groups are pervasive and can be trivial in impact. But when combined with exclusionary social networks and rituals, and used to …
Towards better outcomes for children globally
Contrary to prevailing wisdom, international development does not either succeed or fail. It does both. With reference to case study material gleaned from working with both grant‐makers and international civil society organisations, this article critiques both the assumptions and organisation of development. Development initiatives create small islands of beneficial change for children but in general suffer from donor‐led managerial approaches, t…
La loyauté dans une paire de collants
Les règles, les symboles et les rituels font partie intégrante de la politique. Adoptant une approche empirique et interprétative, l'auteure explore leurs rôles respectifs à l'intérieur d'un lieu particulier, la Chambre haute du Parlement britannique, et d'une période particulière comprise entre 1998 et 2004. Les règles socialisent les nouveaux pairs et les obligent à se conformer aux normes. Le capital symbolique accumulé par les pairs vient, qu…
The science of a good childhood
This article reviews the contents of the previous year's editions of the Journal of Children's Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journal's editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prev…
Protecting children in different contexts
Many child‐focused civil society organisations (CSOs) working in Africa, Asia and South America have shifted from organising their work around children's needs to promoting their rights. The rights‐based frameworks they use are informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article explores the value of global rights. Ethnographic studies about the lives of young people and their transition into adulthood point to dive…
An Anthropology of the House of Lords
This study addresses the puzzle of conformity in the House of Lords; why do any peers attend regularly and usually obey their party whip? Rational choice theory struggles to explain this when you bear in mind that peers tend to be unambitious and do not rely on re-election to stay in parliament. The reasons can be found in a close study of their culture and social relationships; in particular in (a) socialisation in the Lords, (b) the social stat…
Anthropology and Development
Parliamentary Socialisation
Parliamentary Socialisation: Learning the Ropes or Determining Behaviour? by Michael Rush and Philip Giddings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. xvii + 266. £57.50, hb. ISBN: 9780230284890
Ethnographic practice and public aid
Toward an Anthropology of Government
Ethnographic Research in Gendered Organizations
Anthropologists and new institutionalist scholars studying politics share an interest in rules, norms, and power. The former tend to agree more closely with those researchers who rely on inductive empiricism rather than deductive research methods, take an historical perspective, and treat ambiguities as part of the study rather than an inconvenience. As Olivier de Sardan argues, those institutionalist approaches that tend to rely on abstract, pre…
Doing development differently
Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights refo…
The Pleasure and Pain of Electioneering in the UK
Reading the Runes
In public discourse the idea of “evidence-based” law-making implies that expert opinion consists of incontrovertible facts that can be turned into solutions, irrespective of politics. Laws about children are often conceived as if they are especially free from the contamination by politics. This paper will challenge such assumptions, relying on a contemporary historical and ethnographic study to demonstrate how evidence and politics are entangled …
Ethnography of Parliament
Ethnographic approaches are beginning to percolate through political science, but are often taken up as a ‘method’, rather than an approach to methodology and theory. I describe my experience of doing ethnography in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Through the themes of whipping and gender, I explain how theory and method were interwoven and how reflexivity improves rigour. Dealing with the methodological challenge of disjunctions and contradicti…
International Development, Anthropology in
The direct involvement of anthropologists in international development ebbs and flows, while ethnographic researchers consistently offer a critique of aid, especially the damage it causes. Anthropologists' navigation of the ethics, pressures, and contradictions of aid has in common with all development professionals an increasing preoccupation with managerialism and a focus on representation, funding, planning, and audit. They stand with fewer al…
Flagships and tumbleweed
This article contributes to scholarship on the political nature of feminists’ work in international development NGOs. The case study of Oxfam GB (OGB) is contemporary history, based on compiling a brief history of gender justice work between 1986 and 2014 and 18 months of part-time participant-observation fieldwork during 2014–15. I describe funding pressures and imperatives, contestations of meaning and power struggles within OGB and argue that …
Ethnographies of parliament
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider the challenges, advantages and limits of ethnographical approaches to the study of parliament. Challenges in the study of political institutions emerge because they can be fast-changing, difficult to gain access to, have starkly contrasting public and private faces and, in the case of national parliaments, are intimately connected to rest of the nation.Design/methodology/approachEthnography usually …
Chairing UK Select Committees
In this article, we aim to look at the political, social and emotional world created by the UK’s House of Commons select committees and the part played by their chairs. Drawing upon the theoretical traditions of political anthropology (Spencer (2004, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)), group analytical theory (Foulkes (1948, Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and P…
The Silent Traditions of Developing Cooks
Stoves attracted a great deal of aid and attention, and many development agencies, government and non-government, became involved in their promotion. In the history of stoves until the late 1940s, technological development in the &s;South&s; took place either in kitchens, or occasionally in artisan&s;s workshops, largely as a part of commercial enterprise. The perception that the demand for fuelwood was outstripping supply in &s;developing countr…
Anthropology of parliaments
Anthropologists often begin any inquiry by trying to describe the boundaries of the world they have immersed themselves in but parliaments are especially difficult to delineate. They are meeting places for politicians to do political work. But a parliament is also an idea; an institution of the state; a building; and a period of time – a session between elections during which parliamentarians meet to make laws and hold the government to account e…
The sociality of parliaments
Rituals and symbols in politics
Ritual is conceived of as indispensable to religious and royal occasions but tangential to politics by scholars and participants alike. Five distinct kinds of ritual tend be required to make politics work: elections, conferences, informal meetings, decision-making and ceremonies of state. This chapter focuses on parliamentary decision-making and ceremonies of state, before returning to broader questions about political ritual. Ritual can only be …
Improvising together
Social anthropology has variously described itself as a science, a social science and a humanity over the years, emerging with a different way of describing itself in the US and Europe. But there appears to be a general agreement in contemporary debates that anthropology is found at the intersection of all three, even if the personal inclination is towards the humanities. The process of anthropological research is iterative and emergent because t…
Political science (31 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Ethnography (9 obras) · Epistemology (7 obras) · Parliament (7 obras) · Political Systems and Governance (7 obras)