Who's who

Rita Astuti (R.Astuti@lse.ac.uk)
Rita Astuti is an anthropologist whose recent work focuses on learning and conceptual development in relation to the transmission of cultural knowledge. She has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Vezo, a fishing people of western Madagascar. She is the author of People of the sea: identity and descent among the Vezo of Madagascar and Constraints on conceptual development (with Gregg Solomon and Susan Carey).

Sharon Attia (S.Attia@lse.ac.uk)
Sharon Attia is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the LSE. Her research concerns the roles of emotion and cognition in the spread or contagion of cultural representations. She has been investigating the representation of "religious sacrifice" amongst the Israeli settlers and the wider Israeli population, using an innovative on-line research technique to tap into the spread of cultural ideas. She also has interests in the social and cognitive psychology of conflict resolution and suicide bombing.

Eona Bell (E.M.Bell@lse.ac.uk)
Eona Bell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. She took her first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and then an MSc in Anthropology of Learning and Cognition at LSE. She is currently conducting fieldwork with the Chinese community in Edinburgh, focusing on child socialization, especially language socialization and the effects of inter-generational relationships on educational and economic decision-making.

Laurent Berger (l.berger@lse.ac.uk)
Laurent Berger is a Fyssen Foundation postdoctoral research fellow. He is currently affiliated to the Anthropology Department, where he will carry out a project entitled "Cognitive anthropology of ritual policies". He has graduated in Psychology (B.A, University of Paris VIII), in African Languages (Manding, INALCO), and in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Master & PhD, EHESS, Paris). He has conducted fieldwork in Mali on possession cults and in Northern Madagascar on divine kingship. He's the author of Les nouvelles ethnologies (Armand Colin, 2004).

Maurice Bloch (maurice.bloch@wanadoo.fr)
Maurice Bloch has been conducting ethnographic research among the Merina and Zafimaniry of Madagascar for a period of over 30 years. His theoretical contributions have focused on the relationship between culture and psychological processes in humans. Among other things, he is conducting research on folk theories of mind and of mental processes. He is the author of How we think they think and Essays on cultural transmission.

Nancy Cartwright (N.L.Cartwright@lse.ac.uk)
Nancy Cartwright is a methodologist/philosopher of science. She studies interdisciplinary research and is especially concerned with how to bring together knowledge and understanding from various sources across the social and natural sciences, but also including local knowledge and knowledge revealed in practice and techniques, when relevant ‘at the point of action’ - that is, to make concrete predictions and to understand specific concrete situations.

Alison Chryssides (A.F.Chryssides@lse.ac.uk)
Alison Chryssides is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the LSE. Having completed a degree in Music at the Royal Academy of Music, she took a degree in Psychology at the Open University, and an MSc in Social Psychology at the LSE. Her research interests lie in the dialogical relationship between the socio-cultural context and cognitive structures, and how communities deal with, and make sense of encounters with the ‘Other’. Specifically, her research focuses on the development in British children of social representations of Muslims.

Japinder Dhesi (J.Dhesi@lse.ac.uk)
Japinder Dhesi is a first year PhD student in Psychology at the LSE. She holds a BSc in Sociology and MSc in Social Psychology from the LSE. Her doctoral project entitled ‘The cognitive and cultural ecology of racial categorisation’ aims to deepen our understanding of social categorisation by combining the Cognition and Culture perspective with Critical Social Psychology by exploring the interplay between coalitions and social categories such as “race”. She hopes that by providing a more coherent account of “racial” representations the research project will contribute to debates about race and multiculturalism, as well as generating specific social policy implications.

Bradley Franks (B.Franks@lse.ac.uk)
Bradley Franks is a psychologist with a background in social psychology and cognitive science. His principal empirical research interests are in the interaction of cognition, culture and communication in the way people represent conceptual knowledge (in areas ranging from natural kinds to religious domains). He is also interested in the philosophical and methodological issues that arise from trying to understand the mind as both a cultural and evolved phenomenon. He is currently working on a book entitled “Culture and Cognition: Evolutionary Perspectives”, which is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.

Nicholas Humphrey (N.Humphrey@lse.ac.uk)
Nicholas Humphrey studies the evolution of the human mind. His work focuses on social intelligence, mind-reading, and consciousness. Among his recent books are Seeing Red: a Study in Consciousness, and The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontier of Psychology and Evolution.

Sandra Jovchelovitch (S.Jovchelovitch@lse.ac.uk)
Sandra Jovchelovitch is a social and cultural psychologist. Her research focuses on how different socio-cultural contexts shape the development and transformation of knowledge, and in particular how different systems of knowing meet and clash in contemporary public spheres. She has a special interest on the genetic and historical methods developed by Piaget and Vygotsky to the study of mind and on the development of dialogical perspectives to the study of knowledge in context. She is the author of Social Representations and the Public Sphere: The symbolic construction of public spaces in Brazil (Vozes, 2000) and The Health Beliefs of the Chinese Community in England (HEA, 1998, with M-C Gervais). Her new book Knowledge in Context: Representations, community and culture is out now (Routledge, 2007).

Katarina Keresztesova (K.Keresztesova@lse.ac.uk)
Katarina Keresztesova is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the LSE. Besides social psychology, she is especially interested in cognitive sciences (anthropology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and linguistics). Her doctoral research is focusing on the intuitive conceptual representations of social categories - folksociology, with the emphasis on gender and alternative gender identities (transgender) as a test case. In her work she looks for the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological integration of psychology and anthropology.

Nicola Knight (knightn@umich.edu)
Nicola Knight is a cognitive scientist, currently writing his doctoral thesis in anthropology and psychology at the University of Michigan, and a visiting research associate in the LSE anthropology department. His research interests include the psychology of norms and reason-giving, theory of mind, and classification -- all from a cross-cultural perspective -- and the epistemology of anthropology, especially with regard to anthropological claims about cognition.

Aude Michelet (A.P.Michelet@lse.ac.uk)
Aude Michelet is a PhD student in Anthropology at the LSE. She is particularly interested in kinship and learning processes as a key to understand how ‘social reproduction’ operates. Her doctoral research project concentrates on how Mongolian children come to attune their behaviors to relative hierarchical status. Her fieldsite is located in the district of Khuld in the Gobi area of Mongolia.

Eleonora Montuschi (E.Montuschi@lse.ac.uk)
Eleonora Montuschi is a philosopher of social science at LSE, with a specific interest in the methodological issues and questions arising from some social sciences, among which anthropology. She leads a project on ‘Objectivity, Human Values and Social Inquiry’. Her research is on models of objectivity and forms of evidence in science/social science. She is the author of The Objects of Social Science (2003).

Mary Morgan (M.Morgan@lse.ac.uk)
Mary Morgan works on the history and philosophy of science, particularly economics and statistics. She is especially interested in the cognitive and imaginative aspects of scientific work in both theoretical and practical domains. She is author of The History of Econometric Ideas and Models as Mediators (with Margaret Morrison) and is currently finishing a book about how economists build and use models.

Carol Norton (C.A.Norton@lse.ac.uk)
Carol Norton is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the LSE. Her doctoral research concerns how people understand and (fail to) resolve contradictions in their beliefs and actions. A particular focus concerns the relations amongst the UK population between being carnivores on the one hand, but avowing to be "animal lovers" on the other. The extent to which such apparent contradictions are reflected in cognition. She draws upon theoretical ideas from psychology, sociology and anthropology and uses a range of empirical methods.

Denis Regnier (D.A.Regnier@lse.ac.uk)
Denis Regnier holds a first degree in philosophy (Paris) and a MSc in Anthropology of Learning and Cognition (LSE). He is currently registered for a PhD in Anthropology at the LSE, and he is preparing for his doctoral fieldwork (2007-08), which will focus on taboo practices in a Betsileo valley of Highland Madagascar. His interests include the cognitive study of memory and the use of cognitive-epidemiological models to explain cultural phenomena.

Alain Samson (A.Samson@lse.ac.uk)
Alain Samson is a PhD student in Social Psychology at the LSE. His doctoral project is about differences in 'holistic vs analytic' cognition across religious groups in the UK. His PhD work is mostly rooted in cross-cultural psychology, but also includes elements from cognitive anthropology, particularly the notion of 'counter-intuitiveness' in religious representations. Alain has also done experimental research in social cognition as well as market research with aspects of consumer psychology.

Dan Sperber (dan@sperber.com)
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. He is the author of Rethinking Symbolism (1975), On Anthropological Knowledge (1985), Explaining Culture (1996). In these three books, he has developed a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of "epidemiology of representations". Dan Sperber is also the co-author, with Deirdre Wilson (Department of Linguistics, University College, London) of Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Second Revised Edition, 1995) where they proposed a cognitive approach to communication known as "Relevance Theory".

Charles Stafford (C.Stafford@lse.ac.uk)
Charles Stafford is an anthropologist of China and Taiwan, who has conducted ethnographic research on childhood, learning and schooling. His current research project focuses on economic behaviour in the Chinese countryside, with a particular emphasis on processes of learning and skill acquisition. He is the author of The roads of Chinese childhood and Separation and reunion in modern China.

Andrew Wells (A.J.Wells@lse.ac.uk)
Andrew Wells is a psychologist whose principal research interests are the application of ideas from evolutionary theory and the theory of computation to our understanding of the human mind. His current project focuses on the psychology of writing and other forms of graphic communication. He is the author of Rethinking Cognitive Computation: Turing and the Science of the Mind.

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