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

JOURNAL ARTICLES

2011  Cross, J. ‘Detachment as a Corporate Ethic’ submitted to Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology in March 2010, accepted for publication 07-2010)

2011 Cross, J. and MacGregor, H. ‘Knowledge, Legitimacy and Economic Practice in Informal Markets for Medicine’ submitted to Social Science and Medicine in August 2009 (resubmitted 05-2010, accepted for publication 07-2010).

2010 ‘Neoliberalism as Unexceptional: Economic Zones and the Everyday Precariousness of Working Life in South India’ in Critique of Anthropology 30:4.

2010 ‘Occupational Health, Risk and Science in India’s Global Factories’ in South Asian History and Culture, 1:2, 224-238

2009 ‘From Dreams to Discontent: Educated Men and the Everyday Politics of Labour in a Special Economic Zone in South India’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology 43:3, 351-79.

2009 ‘Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid’, co-authored with Alice Street, in Anthropology Today 25:4, 4-9.

2003 ‘Anthropology and the Anarchists: Culture, Power, and Practice in Militant Anti-Capitalist Protest.” In Theomai 7.

BOOK CHAPTERS

2010 ‘Three Miles from Anarchy’: Managerial Fear and the Affective Factory’ in Fear: Sarai Reader 08, Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

2010 ‘Occupational Health, Risk and Science in India’s Global Factories’ in Assa Doron and Alex Broom (eds.) Health, Culture and Religion in South Asia: Critical Social Science Perspectives. London: Routledge.

BOOK REVIEWS

2009 ‘Struggles for an Alternative Globalisation: An Ethnography of Counter-Power in Southern France’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (JRAI) (N.S) 15.

2009 ‘Power and Contestation: India Since 1989’ in the Journal of South Asian Development 4:2.

 OTHER PUBLICATIONS  

 2010 Cross, J., Van der Wal, S. & de Haan, E. Rough Cut: The Global Trade in Non-Diamond Gemstones. Amsterdam: Dutch Centre for Research on Multinationals 

 2009  Cross, J. and MacGregor, H  ‘Who Are ‘Informal Health Providers’ and What Do They Do? Perspectives from Medical Anthropology’ Institute for Development Studies Working Paper No. 334.

2002 The Languages of Solidarity: English and Nepal’s Leftist Labour Movement. Kathmandu: General Federation of Nepalese Trade Unions