I joined the University of Glasgow as Professor in the School of Social and Political Science in 2024. 

As Academic Director of Glasgow Changing Futures I work across the University to develop new mechanisms for knowledge based engagement with global challenges, whilst continuing my own research, teaching and supervising PhD students.

I was previously Chair of Social and Economic Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

My academic publications are listed and available via Google Scholar and Orcid.

As a social anthropologist, my long-term research interests have focused around the social study of climate change adaptation and mitigation. My projects and publications have explored market based approaches to social and economic transformation, the material politics of green entrepreneurship, sustainable technofixes, and eco-design. These interests connect classic anthropological engagements with consumption, exchange, and technology to questions about contemporary transformations in capitalist economies. 

My research practice is grounded in ethnography and has involved interdisciplinary collaborations with mechanical engineers, geoscientists, and urban planners. Through creative collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, and designers, my research practice has also frequently involved the production of physical, visual and digital objects. 

Over the past twenty years I have undertaken research projects in the UK, India, Nepal, Burkina Faso and Tanzania funded by UK Research Councils (ESRC, EPSRC, AHRC) and by Philanthropic Trusts (Leverhulme, Rockerfeller). I have a sustained fieldwork engagement in north-coastal Andhra Pradesh, India. 

Heat, Climate, Cooling

Over the past five years I have been working with colleagues aroujnd the world to develop new approaches to the social study of heat. This work has included, Cool Infrastructures, a major multi-country team based research project into the social and technical infrastructures for cooling. I am currently developing two new research programmes: 1) “Planet Mould”, that explores how climate change is transforming our relationships with abject members of the Fungi kingdom across latitudes, sciences, and politics. 2) "Climates of Degradation" examines the fallout of rising temperatures for chemical manufacturing infrastructures across South Asia and Africa.

Energy, Ethics, Technology

A second strand of my research has examined how fuel and electricity organises or re-organises life in places of chronic global poverty. I have led a number of research programmes into the deployment of solar energy technologies in contexts of chronic poverty, from rural India to humanitarian contexts in Burkina Faso. I am currently completing a book that describes how efforts to design clean lighting technology for people without electricity creates new relationships of inequality. Projects have included: 

• Displaced Energy (an ethnographic study of energy cultures amongst displaced people in Burkina Faso and Kenya) 
• Life Off the Grid (a comparative study of off grid living in Papua New Guinea, India and Scotland)  
• and 2-year study of data politics in Sub Saharan Africa’s off grid energy sector.  

This body of work established new attention to electronic waste in the off grid solar industry and led to an award winning solar powered lighting device, Solar What?!, that established new benchmarks for eco-design. 

Work, Labour, Global Manufacturing  

I have a longstanding engagement with the politics of work and labour across global supply chains. My doctoral and post-doctoral research projects focused on the lived experience of manufactuing in South India. I have written about the impact of liberalising economic reforms on industrial workers; on the aspirations for social mobility that manufacture consent to industrial work discipline; on occupational health and safety and on relationships between technology and gender in India's global workplaces. Elements of this work formed the basis of my first book Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India published in 2014 by Pluto Press. 

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I am interesterd in supervising PhD students across all the areas of my work.