Hannah Knox

My research looks at how anthropology, and in particular ethnographic methods can contribute to a critical understanding of attempts to bring about the social and economic transformation of organizations, cities, regions and nations. I am particularly interested in how ethnography can produce more nuanced and politicised accounts of how technical projects come to produce their varied social effects. To this ends, my research builds upon on work on the history and sociology of expertise to understand the sociality and materiality of contemporary knowledge practices. I have written on: the cultural salience of the network to critique connectivity as a model for social relatedness; on the ways in which self-proclaimed ‘experts’ derive their legitimacy through a capacity to transform phenomena; and on the ways in which ethnography holds the potential to dismantle a separation between formal, rational, technical ways of understanding the world, and more textured, affective modes of being, in order to subject the practice of these separations to analytical attention. My research has included: An ethnography of the development of a new media industry in Manchester, UK; a study of the implementation and use of knowledge management software programs in large organisations including an international airport in the UK, a global manufacturing company and a utilities firm; and an ethnography of road construction in Peru. I am currently conducting a new research project looking at the cultural politics of climate change through an ethnographic study of mitigation and adaptation projects in Manchester, UK. Key Areas of Interest: Anthropology of Engineering Anthropology of the Information Society Imaginaries of the Future Comparative Anthropology of Expertise: Britain and Latin America.