University of Edinburgh

Faculty Member, Social Anthropology

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

About

I currently have a three year research grant to explore the social and technical construction of solar powered lighting systems in places without access to mains electricity.

There is a surge of commercial interest in off-the-grid applications for photovoltaic solar technology across South Asia, East Africa and the Pacific. One application in particular - the solar powered lantern - has gained prominence as a cheaper, safer, low carbon alternative to kerosene and is being linked to reductions in respiratory disease, increases in educational achievement, and improvements in rural livelihoods. Through ethnographic work with solar entrepreneurs, designers, technicians and end users in rural India, this project aims to expand the empirical and analytical frames through which the emergence and success of applications for renewable energy in contexts of 'development' are being understood.

This  research builds on seven years of doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on the social and cultural politics of India’s special economic zones, which have become the country’s most controversial sites of planning, investment and industrialisation. Through long-term ethnographic research with zone workers and displaced communities in the north coastal region of Andhra Pradesh this research has challenged claims that India’s zones are engines of growth, employment and social mobility. He is currently completing a monograph (provisionally entitled ‘Dream Zones: Promise and Loss in Neoliberal India) that explores the zone as a space in which the visions, investments, aspirations and dystopian imaginaries of politicians, farmers, transnational management executives, under-employed young people and social movement activists converge and overlap.

Publications

Journal articles


2011      (forthcoming) Cross, J. ‘Technological Intimacy: Re-engaging with gender, skill and technology in the global factory’ in Ethnography

2011      Cross, J. 'Detachment as a Corporate Ethic: Materializing CSR in the diamond supply chain' in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60.

2010      Cross, J. ‘Neoliberalism as Unexceptional: Economic Zones and the Everyday Precariousness of Working Life in South India’ in Critique of Anthropology 30:4, 355-373.

2010      Cross, J. and MacGregor, H. ‘Knowledge, Legitimacy and Economic Practice in Informal Markets for Medicine’ Social Science and Medicine 71: 9, 1537-1702.

2010      Cross, J. 'Occupational Health, Risk and Science in India's Global Factories' in South Asian History and Culture, 1:2, 224-238

2009      Cross, J. ‘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      Cross, J. and Street, A. ‘Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid’, in Anthropology Today 25:4, 4-9.

2003      Cross, J ‘Anthropology and the Anarchists: Culture, Power, and Practice in Militant Anti-Capitalist Protests.’ 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
2011      ‘Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S.) 17,2: 405-406

2011      ‘Mobile work, mobile lives: cultural accounts of lived experiences’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (N.S) 17: 178-22

2010      ‘Stuff’ in Anthropological Notebooks, Journal of the Slovenian Anthropological Society.

2009      ‘Struggles for an Alternative Globalisation: An Ethnography of Counter-Power in Southern France’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (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: Centre for Research on Multinationals (SOMO)

2009      ‘Who Are ‘Informal Health Providers’ and What Do They Do? Perspectives from Medical Anthropology’, co-authored with Hayley MacGregor. Institute for Development Studies Working Paper No. 334.

Contact Information