Eman Shehata is an economic anthropologist whose research and writing explore working life, affect and vulnerable intimacies under late capitalism. Her work draws on feminist and counter-humanist theoretical approaches to the economy, with a focus on the Mediterranean region. It has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Pat Caplan Prize for best MA dissertation (2017) and the Raymond Firth Prize for best paper presented at the Departmental Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory at LSE (2024). 

Eman completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2024. Her doctoral thesis, “Masters of None”, is an ethnography of back-to-work simulations grounded in 14 months of fieldwork at a practice company in Lyon, France. It inquired about how people respond to uncertain labour conditions and sought to understand workplace rehearsal through the ambiguities of play.  Her ethnography of rehearsal examines the desires and pursuits of mastery that arise during professional training practices in France, along with their limitations.

Before her time at LSE, she worked as a researcher and consultant on projects that revolved around understanding contemporary global capitalist phenomena through the lens of sociality and cultural history, where she researched the politics of data in the MENA region and sexual harassment in organisational cultures in Cairo.

 Eman is currently working on turning some of her thesis chapters into articles and plans to produce a monograph of her dissertation.