Research Interests:

Migration and diaspora, urban anthropology, cultural change, ethnic and 'non-ethnic' identities, violence, state, human rights/legal anthropology, knowledge practices, anthropological debates; digital technologies, belonging and cities

Editor, Journal of Legal Anthropology - http://anthropologies-in-translation.org

Narmala Halstead is an anthropologist with regional expertise on Guyana, the Caribbean diaspora and migrant localities in New York. She has also conducted research on migrants in London on Portuguese migrants in Wales, UK and her work included a project on different sites of publicness and personhood. Her research explores belonging, cultural change and violence, spanning everyday accounts as well as larger issues on 'open borders', global citizenship and the state. Her work has developed insights on people's encompassment of foreign identities as forms of inhabiting the 'centre' which also engage with and shift notions of alternative modernity.

Her work has explored cultural displays by those who also had non-distinctive identities and considered issues of status, identity and forms of socio-political violence in various settings. Her research sites included ‘wedding houses’, 'chutney' music sessions, interactions between people and state-like institutions and cafes outside law courts among others. She is currently developing a project on cities, digital technologies, citizenship and belonging.

After completing her PhD (anthropology) at Brunel University, Narmala taught for a year at Brunel and for several years at Cardiff University. She held a university lectureship with Cardiff University. Her students included international media professionals who became enthusiastic about doing ethnographic research.

She has organised and led post-graduate research retreats for students and presented on this work in three cities in China. She utilises my fieldwork experiences as teaching resources. In 2006, she was awarded a UEL Teaching Fellowship for her teaching practice. Narmala teaches on the anthropology programme and have also taught the MRes module, Understanding Research Processes and Contexts. She is currently managing an Urban anthropology fieldwork programme where students are guided to conduct six months' fieldwork in London for their dissertations. She is the convenor of an incoming MSc in Anthropology, HUman Rights and Justice. For further details on this programme, please email her. http://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/programmes/ahrj.htm

Her teaching and research combine interests in anthropological theoretical issues and the role people as participants play in the research process. She have presented widely on her research inclusive of papers at the Young Scholar’s Plenary at EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) in Copenhagen, the University of Vienna, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, University of British Columbia and Fudan University, China. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology, New York University (NYU) in 2003.

PhD Completions:

• Chuensumon Ukritwiriya - mobile phones and modernity in Bangkok. ( She is now Associate Dean, Mahakorn University, Thailand)
• Muideen Akorede - study of a Nigerian village and NGOs in relation to development issues and local knowledge.
• Diana Chimba - Study on 'Women, Media and Democracy' in Zambia

Current MPhil/PhDs:

• Celine Cantat: Movements and organisations vis-à-vis migrants' rights in the European Union and member states
• Charles de Ledesma: Fieldwork on trance dance

I would be interested in supervising students wishing to do research on migration and diaspora, belonging, violence, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, modernity, media anthropology, human rights, legal anthropology and related issues.

• Anthropology
• MRes

• A12131: Anthropological Theory
• AI1122 Urban Anthropology
• AI3000 Thesis/Project for Anthropology (Urban anthropology fieldwork programme in London)
• AI2150 Knowing Humankinds. Anthropology of Difference and Diaspora
• AI1124 Bodies and Persons
• AI2141 Cultures of Dominance, Cultures of Resistance

Publications post 2001:

Articles in Refereed Journals

2012

East Indians as familiars and partial others in New York. History and
Anthropology 23(1): 149-169
 
Undoing Resistance. East Indians beyond the culture bound. South Asian
Diaspora 10(2):123-135
 
2011

Gift practices in the East Indian Diaspora: status, equality and loss
through inclusion. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
16(2): 278-295
 

2009

• A landscape of respect relations. Television, status, houses Home Cultures 6 (1)

2008

• Violence, past and present. 'Mati' and 'non-mati' people. History and Anthropology 19 (2): 115-129

2008

• Victims and agents un-made. Routinising the Extraordinary. Social Anthropology , 16 (1): 119-133

2002

• Branding ‘perfection’. Foreign as self; self as foreign-foreign. Journal of Material Culture. 7 (3): 273-93

2001

• Ethnographic Encounters: Positionings within and outside the insider frame. Social Anthropology 9: 307-21

Edited Book and Journals

2008

• EASA edited volume series - Knowing how to know. Fieldwork and the ethnographic present. Co-editors, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely. Berghahn: Oxford

2008 - ongoing

• Journal of Legal Anthropology - 2008, 2010, 2012

2008

• Special issue on Landscapes of violence. Social Anthropology, 16. Co-edited with Heather Horst

Chapters in Books

Forthcoming

Written and encountered. Person-centred trajectories in Helena Wulff (ed.) Anthropologist as Writer

2008

• Knowledge as gifts of self and other. In Knowing how to Know. Fieldworkand the Ethnographic Present. Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely, eds. Pp.92-119. Oxford: Berghahn

2008

• Knowing through crisis. Experiencing the ethnographic present. In Knowing how to Know. Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely, eds. Pp.1-20. Oxford: Berghahn

2006

• Others in and of the field.Anthropology and Knowledgeable persons. In Critical Journeys.The Making of Anthropologists. Geert de Neve and Maya Unithan-Kumar, eds. Pp. 47-66. UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

2005

• Belonging and respect notions vis-à-vis modern East Indians. Hindi movies in the Guyanese East Indian Diaspora. In Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha, eds. New Delhi: Sage

Encyclopaedia entries

• In press Guyana: culture, economy, government. World and its Peoples Encyclopaedia. London: Brown Reference Group
• 2001 Guyana: Media. Censorship: An International Encyclopedia. London: Fitzroy Dearbon. 1010-1011

Book Reviews include

2007

• Linger, Daniel Touro. 2005. Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Social Anthropology. 15:377-378.
• Khan, Aisha. 2006. Callaloo nation: metaphors of race and religious identity among South Asians in Trinidad.(Book review). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 13: 239-240

2006

• Knauft, Bruce M., ed. 2002 Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Anthropological Theory. 6:553
• Lyn Harbottle. 2004. Food for Health, Food for Wealth: The Performance of Ethnic andGender identities by Iranian Settlers in Britain. Oxford: Berghahn . Anthropological Notebooks. 142-144
• Machado-Borges, T. 2003. Only for You! Brazilians and the telenovela flow. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Social Anthropology. 14: 287-288

2004

• Van der Veer, Peter. 2001. Imperial encounters. Religion and modernity in India and Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Social Anthropology. 12:391
• Key Publications pre 2001 Include
• 2000. Switching identities: Movements between ‘Indian’ and ‘non-Indian’ in Guyana. Anthropology in Action. 7 (1 -2). 22-32.
• 2000. Television in Guyana: A Regulatory Nightmare in Sue Ralph et al (eds.) Is Regulation still an option in a digital universe? Luton: University of Luton Press

FORTHCOMING CONFERENCE

2010 Discussant: AAA panel - Brands, Counterfeiting, Authenticity, and Authority, American Anthropological Association Annual conference, New Orleans

Selected Research Papers

• 2010 Grounding the extra-territorial local. Violence, Agency and new boundaries. CRASSH conference on Legal Subjectivity: Popular/community justice in Latin American. Cambridge University.
  
  2009 ‘Outside stigma’ and the local. ‘Chaste brides’, multi-skilled experts and others.
  CASCA/AES conference. University of British Columbia. Also presented at Latin American and Caribbean Seminars. Dept of Anthropology. St Andrews University

• 2008. Paper: Creating and becoming others. American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel organised with Heather Horst. Panel: Knowledge, Engagement, Ethics, San Francisco

• 2008. Guest lecture and workshop: Critical Methodologies - ethnography in research and teaching practice, Mahanakorn University of Technology, Bankgok, 2008

  2008. UEL Teaching and Learning Workshop. Reflections and Practice. Anthropological Research and Teaching. Oxford University

• 2008. Victims and Agents Un-made. Routinising the Extraordinary. LSE Anthropology departmental seminars

• 2007. Victims and agents unmade. Panel organisers: Narmala Halstead and Heather Horst. Panel: Landscapes of violence.Un-making, forgetting, erasing the other. AAA conference, Washington DC: Difference, (In)Equality and Justice.
• 2006.Entangled knowledge, complicit violence. Organiser of panel: Intersecting Crisis. In-between anthropologies of state and knowledge. AAA conference, San Jose: Critical Intersections/Dangerous Issue
• 2006. Modernity and the question of Origins. Caribbean Association conference, Port-of-Spain
• 2005 Inside houses, outside persons, television and status. Mobility and locatedness in Guyanese villages. 2005 AAA conference, Washington DC – Bringing the past into the present
• 2005.Engaging the field: Knowledge as gifts of self and other. Invited public lecture, NUI Maynooth Anthropology Programme. NUI Maynooth

• 2005.Inhabiting lifeworlds through difference. Belonging, not belonging and gifting. University of Vienna
• 2005.Modes of knowing: the instant-expert frame, popular representations and reflexivity. Fudan University, China
• 2004 Inhabiting the ‘outside.’ Violence and the ‘absentee’ citizen. Roundtable on Globalization and Containment, SANA, Atlanta
• 2004.Others of and in the field. ASA conference, Durham
• 2004.Workshop: Mobile Localities and knowledge; Co-convenor with Elizabeth Lien (Oslo) for EASA conference, Vienna
• 2004.Being there: ‘non-places,’ home and the rituals of leave-taking. EASA conference, Vienna
• 2004.Citizenship, diaspora and violence: Post September 11 and the narratives of belonging. UCL Material culture seminars
• 2003 American flags and Hindi pennants of worship. Re-imagining Diaspora symposium. MCCA. Liverpool John Moore University
• 2003.Shame and sexuality. Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology seminar series. University of Hull
• 2003.Mediating access and modernity through food. ASA conference, University of Manchester
• 2002 Indigenous to What? Anthropology as other.Presented at EASA Young Scholars Plenary in Copenhagen
• 2002.Privileging knowledge construction. Presented at C-Sap conference, B’ham
• 2001 American brands. Insidership outside ethnicity. Presented at UCL ‘Material Culture’ seminars and at Swansea University
• 2001.Individual agency and collective representations. University of Vienna. Socrates Programme
• 2000 Identity within and beyond ethnicity.Brunel University. Conference: Generations: Continuity and Change’
• 2000.Indian culture as the ‘local’ in contrast to the ‘global’ everyday. University of Manchester. Conference on ‘Globalisation, culture and everyday’
• 2000.Identity enactment, ethnographic encounters and an imagined sanctuary.University of Hull. Conference ‘ Identity and/in Movements’
• 2000.‘Cultures’ of belonging: Branding and ‘Unbranding’ the Multicultural. University of Hull forum in Dubrovnik, ‘Grounding Multiculturalism’
• 2000.‘Filmi’ Culture, Indian Culture: The ‘belonging’ of Hindi movies in Guyana and New York.University of Wales, Swansea. Conference, ‘Writing Diasporas’
• 2000.‘Real’ Indians, ‘Katahar’ Brahmins: Retranslating the modern everyday. LSE conference ‘Anthro-Change’
• 1998 The claiming of television by the marginalised. Research Away Day. Brunel University

Membership in Professional Associations :

• Royal Anthropological Institute, fellow and member of the council
• Member of American Anthropological Association, American Ethnologist Society, European Association of Social Anthropologists