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Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
Institute of Education and Humanities
Tel: 01570 424941
Email: l.attala@uwtsd.ac.uk
Role in the University
- Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
- Programme Director for Undergraduate and Postgraduate studies in Anthropology
- Faculty Learning and Teaching Lead
- Faculty Sustainability Committee Rep
Background
Current Teaching
- People’s Worlds: Lives and Livelihoods
- Interactions with the Environment: making things, transforming things
- Materialities in Anthropology
- In the Field
- Human Evolution and Hunter Gatherers
- Family, Gender and Sexuality
- Key Debates in Anthropology
- Independent Project
- Dissertation
Academic Interests
Luci Attala is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Luci champions experiential and active learning as the route to empowering graduates to be able to seek solutions to today’s global problems.
Recently charged with redesigning the delivery methods for all disciplines on the Faculty of Humanities, Luci has created a system that aims to draw students’ potential out experientially whilst furnishing them with a broad set of skills that are designed to increase their confidence to act.
Learning with (not about) the world is at the root of anthropology. Taking inspiration from participant observation and ethnographic methodology, Luci maintains that allowing her students to lead her as much as the other way around liberates novel and astonishing conclusions, associations and learnings for all.
Luci sits on Oxford University’s Educere Network. Comprised of anthropologists and policy makers, the network aims to synergise the fields of education, wellbeing and sustainability through exploration of alternative methods of learning alongside indigenous pedagogies. In 2015 she received the Green Gown Award for her inspirational contribution to sustainable education.
Research Interests
Luci’s research interests are underpinned by a focus on materialities with specific attention afforded to water. Luci is currently exploring the role water plays in shaping lives in rural Kenya, Spain and Wales, but also considers water’s part in organizing human bodies and social behaviours more widely. Taking inspiration from post-humanism, the morethanhuman move and multispecies ethnographies, her work asks the question ‘how does water make us human’ and adopts a new materialities framework - that draws the physics of relating substances to the foreground - to obtain an answer.
Luci co-edits the #LampeterMatters book series with Louise Steel. The series adopts a New Materialities approach that explores the role materials play in shaping human lives.
I have conducted regular ethnographic fieldwork with the Giriama in Bore Koromi near Malindi in the Coastal Province of Kenya since 2010. My research primarily concerns water acquisition in rural east Kenya where semi-peripatetic horticulturalists are negotiating and adapting to deepening drought as a result of climate change. It specifically attends to the socio-economic consequences of the commodification of water for people who have traditionally relied on rainfall that comes without a pecuniary cost. Consequently, it engages with wider debates that circulate sustainability, development, social justice, environment and water – including: meanings and materiality.
Luci’s work in Kenya is supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and was recognized in 2014 by the United Nations with the receipt of a Gold Star Award.
Expertise
- Water, including water security and the materiality of water
- East Africa, specifically rural Kenya
- Giriama
- New Materialities
- Edibility, plant agency, ethnobotany