Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Jamie Cross

Jamie Cross has an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2009-2010) to explore the cultural politics of India’s new economic zones, one of the country’s most controversial arenas of contemporary planning, investment, and global industry.

This project explores the economic zone as a space in which the modern visions, speculative investments, social aspirations and dystopian imaginaries of development planners, displaced rural communities, transnational corporations, under-employed young people, management executives and social movement activists overlap, with productive, transformative and unintended consequences.

Research for this project has included a one-year apprenticeship at a major offshore diamond processing facility and ethnographic fieldwork in highway townships, peri-urban villages, and resettlement colonies across a rapidly industrializing part of coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India.

A book based on this project - ‘Dream Zones: Promise and Loss in India’s Economic Enclaves’ - is due to be published by the Social Science Press/Berghahn in 2010.

In addition, he is involved in collaborative research with anthropologists at the University of Sussex and at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore that explores the sale of goods and services for low-income consumers in South Asia. Through ethnographies of marketing, financing, and distribution this ongoing work explores how the language of ‘value co-creation’ is allying to corporate strategies for market expansion to international development objectives.

He has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Sussex (2008).

Selected publications

2010 (forthcoming) ‘Education, Social Mobility and Blighted Hope at a Special Economic Zone in South India’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology

2009 with Alice Street, ‘Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid’ Anthropology Today 25,4