Mark Johnson is currently Head of Graduate School and is PI of the following AHRC, British Academy and RCUK GCRF funded research projects: The AHRC Curating Development project (2016-18) investigates Filipino migrants’ contributions to development; the British Academy project, Big Data, Live Methods and Surveillance Subjectivities (2016-18) explores perceptions and experiences of surveillance among Filipino and British transnationals in Hong Kong and the recently awarded RCUK GCRF GlobalGRACE (Global Gender and Cultures of Equality, 2017 - 2021) project investigates the production of cultures of equality in fragile contexts across the world.
Prior to joining Goldsmiths, he taught at the University of Hull where he served as Director of Research and REF lead for a large multidisciplinary School of Social Sciences. He was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Stockholm University, Autumn 2014, funded by the Forum for Asian Studies and was Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Space and Gender, Universities of Gottingen-Kassel in April, 2011. He is the chair of the expert advisory committee for the EU funded GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project, based at the University of Hull, and is a member of the editorial boards of American Ethnologist, Sociological Review and South East Asian Research.
Teaching
Supervision
Dr Johnson is currently supervising 7 PhD students (four at Goldsmiths and three as an external supervisor at Hull University). He has previously supervised 13 students to successful completion, the majority of whom are now working in universities in the UK and across the world. Recent topics include studies of love and queer subjectivities in the UK and the investigation of cultural intimacy and heritage in Laos.
Johnson, Mark; Lee, Maggy and McCahill, Mike. 2018. Race, Gender and Surveillance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Asia. In: Mary Bosworth; Alpa Palmer and Yolanda Vasquez, eds. Race, Criminal Justice and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-28. ISBN 9780198814887
Johnson, Mark and Dawson, Andres. 2001. Exile and landscapes of the imagination. In: Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, eds. Contested Landscapes Movement, Exile and Place. London: Bloomsbury / Berg, pp. 319-332. ISBN 9781859734674
Dr Mark Johnson's research interests and writing are focused broadly around the issues of gender/sexuality, landscape and material culture, migration and transnationalism. He has conducted ethnographic research in the Philippines, Vietnam, Costa Rica and more recently Saudi Arabia. Research in the Philippines was concerned with gender and sexual diversity, in the context of both real and imagined movements of people and the growth of ethno-nationalist discourse. Research in Vietnam was concerned with the making of place and heritage at the World Heritage site of Hue, Vietnam. Together with Suzanne Clisby, he undertook a small pilot study focused on the social relations of environmentalism in Costa Rica. Later AHRC funded research focused on the place of religion in the experiences of Filipino migrant workers in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in particular.
His current funded research projects are as follows:
The British Academy project, Big Data, Live Methods and Surveillance Subjectivities among British and Filipino Transnational Migrants in Hong Kong (2016-18) investigates ordinary people’s awareness of and perceptions about different sorts of surveillance they encounter travelling to and living and working in Hong Kong. The research explores in particular the connections between care and control in processes of watching and being watched. The research is a collaborative project with Prof Maggy Lee, University of Hong Kong, and Mike McCahill (University of Hull) working in conjunction with Lenlen Mesina, a freelance researcher.
The AHRC Curating Development project (2016-18) investigates Filipino migrants’ contributions to development in the Philippines and involves academic and non-academic partners in Hong Kong, London and the Philippines (PI Johnson, CIs Deirdre McKay, Keele University and Maggy Lee, University of Hong Kong & Research Associate, Gabriela Nicolescu, Goldsmiths). The research involves a series of arts based workshops that enabled participants, mainly Filipino care and domestic workers, to reflect on the different meanings of development and their contributions to that. Specifically participants were asked to share digital images stored on smartphones. Participants were also asked to bring objects which they either carried with them from their home place or that they had or intended to send back to people in the Philippines: prints were made of the digital images and the objects were photographed individually. Participants were then invited to write on and talk about objects, images, life projects and obstacles faced. We also worked with and commissioned artists to respond to the workshops and the images produced. The major output from this research has been an exhibition, entitled Beyond Myself, that was launched by His Excellency, Antonio M Lagdameo, the Philippine Ambassador to the UK, at Goldsmiths in December 2017 and will travel to Manila and Hong Kong in 2018.
The RCUK GCRF funded GlobalGRACE (Global Gender and Cultures of Equality) project investigates the production of cultures of equality in fragile contexts across the world. Co-directed by Suzanne Clisby and Mark Johnson and led by a team of researchers at Goldsmiths, including Yasmin Gunaratnam, Nirmal Puwar and Jimmy Turner, GlobalGRACE brings together a large consortium of academic co-investigators and non-academic partners from Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa and the UK, as well as expert consultants from Europe and the USA. The project has two basic organising ideas. The first is that equality is a cultural artefact: our project seeks to investigate the variety of ways that equalities are made and contested in different parts of the world. The second is that cultures might best be understood as the practices through which people create the worlds they inhabit: our project investigates how people’s creativity produce moments when inequality can be challenged and engender new possibilities for more equitable ways of living together.
