Emma Crewe

Biography

I have been teaching and working on international aid and development since the late 1980s. I began as a social scientist in the energy department of an international non-governmental organisation while undertaking doctoral research on the politics of aid (published in ‘Whose Development? 1998, co-authored with E A Harrison). As a lecturer at the University of Sussex (1993-96) I taught on anthropology and development studies courses. Subsequently I was an adviser to grant-makers and freelance consultant working with donor governments and NGOs. More recently, I was Executive Director of ChildHope, a UK-based INGO working on social justice with national NGOs and networks in Africa, Asia and Latin America (2005-2011). My ethnographies of the House of Lords (ESRC funded, 1998-2002) and the British House of Commons (on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2011-2013) were the first on the UK Parliament. I am currently co-ordinating a research coalition investigating Parliament and public engagement in Bangladesh and Ethiopia with Hansard Society and national researchers (ESRC-DFID funded, 2014-2017). I also teach on a highly innovative course at the University of Hertfordshire Business School, supervising postgraduates to research their own organisations and drawing on sociology/anthropology, complexity sciences, and American pragmatism.

Research Interest

Anthropology and Sociology