Professor Rebecca Cassidy
Professor Cassidy is one of the most exciting anthropologists working in the UK right now, and we are lucky enough to have her in London, just across town at Goldsmiths University. She has arrived at Goldsmiths via Cambridge (at undergraduate level) and Edinburgh (for PhD). A principle research interest of Professor Cassidy’s is horse racing, horse centred societies and human animal relations. Her interest in horses has led to periods of fieldwork in Newmarket and in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, and to a number of publications, including and introduction toThe Cambridge Companion to Horseracing (2014), Horse People: Thoroughbred Culture in Lexington and Newmarket (2007) and The Sport of Kings (2008). As if this were not enough, Professor Cassidy is also an expert in risk and gambling. These are, of course, important and emerging topics in contemporary anthropology, and Professor Cassidy has contributed and fundamentally changed these debates via a steady stream of well-received articles (for example “Casino Capitalism and the Financial Crisis” (2009) in Anthropology Today and “Horse versus Machine: Battles in the betting shop (2012) in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute). She also holds the role of Principle Investigator at GAMSOC, a wide-ranging European project which seeks to observe changing gambling products and behaviours as they respond to new regulations and technologies; as an attempt to understand this multibillion pound phenomenon as it changes and grows, their work is unparalleled and timely. As one of our two keynote speakers, we are looking forward to Professor Cassidy taking her comprehensive understanding of the realities of fieldwork, derived from her pioneering work in the fields of Human-animal relations and gambling/risk taking behaviours, and applying it to our conference themes.
Knowing gambling: an ethnography of impact
Keynote Lecture (Lecture Centre, room LC 068)
Abstract. This paper uses the example of gambling research to explore the contemporary politics of expert knowledge. It is a comment on the conditions of production in which we anthropologists currently find ourselves, the implications of those conditions for our discipline, and ways forward. Partly, it is a protest, and will I hope provide some grounds for resistance to the impact paradigm that is currently stifling innovation and critical thinking in social science. It is based on my investigation of gambling research, and the processes through which gambling becomes knowable. It describes the potential of anthropology, and of comparison, to disrupt an established field of public policy by showing how knowledge is produced about a subject. This is partly a practical task of following the money and observing how particular images of gambling are rewarded while others are ignored or actively suppressed. But it is also a creative process. Neglected images, of gambling as a particular kind of relation, are resurrected in order to make the established tropes of 'problem gambling' and 'responsible gambling' appear exotic and even bizarre, at least temporarily.
Professor Judith Okely
Professor
Judith Okely is probably best known as an unparalleled authority on
British Gypsies. Her book, The Traveler-Gypsies (Cambridge University
Press,1982) has become a classic piece of ethnography and has
informed a generation of scholars working with international Gypsies,
Roma and Travelers. More than just for her impressive fieldwork
record (including fieldwork in western Ireland, England and rural
France), Okely is rightly applauded for her recent theoretical
contributions, including Anthropological Practice: fieldwork and the
Ethnographic Method (Berg,2012). In this new volume, the author
presents candid dialogues with twenty anthropologists (representing
sixteen nationalities) which pull back the curtain to reveal the
reality of anthropological practice beyond the limits of
methodological textbooks, providing an inside examination of what is
too often a closed and under-theorised system. We at Brunel University, however,
know Professor Okely best as an inspiring visiting lecturer and
Research Fellow. Professor Okely studied at the Sorbonne (Paris) and
at Oxford and Cambridge universities. in addition to her work with us
here at Brunel University, she has taught and led research at Durham, Essex,
Edinburgh, Hull and Oxford universities and at the International
Gender Studies Centre - Oxford. Her contribution to recent debates
within anthropology has been insightful and wide ranging, as her
recent publication record in Journals such as Anthropology
Matters (2012)
andSocial
Anthropology (2008)
demonstrate. We, the organising committee of the conference, eagerly
anticipate Professor Okely’s Thursday evening keynote address. It
is an exciting prospect to be hosting a researcher who combines a
record of pioneering fieldwork, decades of experience at a roster of
eminent institutions and a number of important recent theoretical
contributions. We are, it is something of an understatement to say,
very happy to have her back. Key Associates for published ethnography and
fieldwork publication and before the internet
Keynote Lecture (Lecture Centre, room LC 068)
Abstract. In
varied fieldwork contexts, those with whom this anthropologist formed
exceptional rapport were all literate. This is despite the fact that
the majority of Gypsies, on whose camps whom she lived, were
non-literate. Key individuals from varied ethnographic contexts
included: a WW1 deserter in rural Oxfordshire, four Gypsy men and
women, and a Normandy woman farmer. They inspired new understandings
across space and time. Intellectual reciprocity developed within
emergent friendship. But, in one key example, the misinterpretation
of a subsequent publication caused total rupture. The academic
identity of the anthropologist was conceived as betrayal by this once
close friend. By contrast, in another case, the anthropologist
successfully exploited a hitherto less visible identity as an Oxford
graduate, appearing as character witness at the court of the Old
Bailey. This was defending a Gypsy man charged with abduction,
illegal gun use and attempted murder.
Decades
later, the anthropologist’s publications have been enthusiastically
engaged with by literate Gypsies, Travellers and Roma, now university
graduates. Regrettably the only disconnect, verging on abuse in print
and on the internet, has come from gaje (non Gypsy) academics,
especially linguists, misinformed about or misrepresenting social
anthropology.
Ben Bowles (2014). On behalf of the Organising Committee, 4th RAI PG Conference, Brunel University.
