Team

Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the USTAN. He is a Brazilian museologist and anthropologist. Between 2019 and 2022, he was Chair of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) and currently is co-chair of the Standing Committee for the Museum Definition of ICOM. His most recent book, The Anticolonial Museum (Routledge, 2023), explores the rhetoric of decolonisation in museum theory and its political and material consequences in Europe and Latin America. His research interests have focused on reflexive museology, community-based museums and the political uses of museums and cultural heritage.

PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at USTAN. He works with the Guarani-Mbya people in São Paulo, Brazil, and his major research interest is to draw connections between Amerindian Studies, Multispecies Ethnography and Medical Anthropology. He holds a Wellcome Trust Studentship to carry a research project whose main goal is to deepen anthropological understandings of health, illness and disease issues in contexts where the Guarani-Mbya people, rodents and microorganisms become entangled through leptospirosis within the Jaraguá Indigenous Land.

PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at USTAN and Research Assistant of the Centre of Minorities Research. Her doctoral research centres on the potential dialogue between the indigenous and non-indigenous knowledges in Brazilian universities. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with indigenous academics in Brazil since 2020, with the focus on the field of knowledge or epistemic traditions, as encountered by indigenous academics in Brazil. She holds an MRes in Social Anthropology from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil (2016) and the University of St Andrews, UK (2019) on the perception of knowledge and what constitutes knowledge in academia.

Lecturer in Sustainable Development at the USTAN. His main areas of research concern human-nature relationships and conflicts about the natural environment, its values, and governance. He has previously conducted research with the Urarina people of the Peruvian Amazon to understand the social, economic and cultural significance they attach to tropical peatland and wetland ecosystems in a larger collaboration involving anthropologists, ecologists, and physical geographers. He has an interdisciplinary background in Geography (PhD, Edinburgh), Environment and Development (MSc, Edinburgh), and Politics and Public Administration (BA, Konstanz). He is a member of Work Package 4 – ‘Reassessing Indigenous Cosmo-Ecologies: Current Entanglements and Potential Contributions between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.’

PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at USTAN. His doctoral thesis investigates present-day entanglements between community leadership and state bureaucracy in the Putumayo region of Colombia’s Amazon. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Mocoa and several other rural and urban areas in Putumayo, it focuses on the daily social life, world views, and trajectories of mostly female leaders and government officials. It looks at the work and errands of indigenous and nonindigenous leaders in Putumayo’s landscape of politics and state interventions, particularly concerning state-sponsored antipoverty programmes.

Teaches at the University of St Andrews. He has been Director of the Centre for Amerindian Studies and the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He is the author or editor of ten volumes, including An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica, How to Read Ethnography and Cosmopolitan Moment, and Cosmopolitan Method. His work centres on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics with an ethnographic focus on the Caribbean and its ‘creolising’ social-cultural processes. His writing moves between an ethnographic (descriptive-analytical) strand and an exploration of grounding concepts in anthropology: these include the idea of ‘common-sense’ as a human universal.

Research Fellow in the School of Art History at the USTAN. He is the Treasurer of the International Committee of Museology (ICOFOM). His experience includes working and supporting multi-disciplinary projects across the Global South, and his research interests include community heritage, sustainable development, and youth participation in community-based museums. He previously led the bi-regional youth exchange between Latin America and Europe for the award-winning EU-LAC Museums project (EC Horizon 2020, 2016-2021), was Co-Investigator for the Community Crafts and Culture project (GCRF, 2019-2021), Co-ordinator for heritage-based projects in Costa Rica, Peru, Tanzania and Ukraine (GCRF, 2020-2022) in the School of Geosciences and the School of Geography and Sustainable Development. Currently, he leads the research-led youth exchange between Scotland and the Caribbean for the Shared Island Stories project (ERC-selected and UKRI-funded 2022-2027) and the ICOFOM-special project Young People Shaping the Future of Museology Through the Lens of the SDGs global workshop series (ICOM-funded 2022-2024).

Professor of Art History at the School of Art History at the USTAN, specialising in Museum and Heritage Studies. She is the Chair of the International Committee of Museology (ICOFOM) and has coordinated several relevant research projects, including Shared Island Stories (UKRI 2022-2027) and EU-LAC Museums (EC Horizon 2020, 2016-2021). She has (co-)edited several special issues relating to community museums, ecomuseums and sustainability, including Brown, Karen, Alissandra Cummins & Ana Sol González Rueda, eds (forthcoming 2022), Communities and Museums in the Twenty-First Century: Shared Histories and Climate Action. Routledge; Brown, Karen, ed. (2019), ‘Museums and Local Development’, Museum International, Routledge; Brown, Karen, Peter Davis & Luís Raposo, eds (2019), On Community and Sustainable Communities (Lisbon).

Professor in human geography with an interest in global challenges that sit at the interface between development and the environment. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Social Sciences, her lifelong passion is Peru, where she has worked with Peruvian research partners for more than 30 years. She has authored five books, including Indigenous Development in the Andes. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Geographical Society Busk Medal for her contribution to social inclusion and international development. She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, ‘Development futures in a COVID, climate challenges world: a decolonial approach’, which reflects on more than three decades of field-based research in Peru and the wider Lain American region.

Senior Researcher and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and co-director of the Centre of Amerindian, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies at USTAN. His research focuses on waste, waste pickers, and plastics, as well as intersections between social and circular economies. He has a regional specialism in Latin America, having conducted research in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico, but has also carried out fieldwork in the UK and on the global waste picker movement.

PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at USTAN. Her research project focuses on love and emotional experiences among different generations of Chinese in Jamaica. She is interested in topics related to emotions, migration and literary anthropology. She is currently the PhD representative of MITRA (Migrant Transnationalism), a standing committee under the largest migration research network, IMISCOE.

Bruno Brulon Soares

Ana Gutierrez Garza

Bruno Silva Santos

Camila Ferreira Marinelli

Christopher Schulz

Cristian Erazo Romero

Huon Wardle

Jamie Allan Brown

Jessica Hope

Karen Brown

Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri

Nina Laurie

Patrick O'Hare

Yichi Zhang

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