Email I.L.Koch@lse.ac.uk
Administrative support:
Sarah Lee
Room: New Academic Building 7.17
Tel. 020 7849 4992
Insa Koch
joined the law department as an assistant professor in law and
anthropology in 2014. Prior to joining the Law department, Insa trained
as both a lawyer and an anthropologist at the LSE and completed a DPhil
at the University of Oxford. She also worked as an LSE Fellow in the
department of Anthropology for two years. Insa has been the recipient of
a number of grants, including from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the
German National Academic Foundation and the ESRC. In 2016, Insa was
appointed academic fellow at Inner Temple.
Research Interests
Insa is interested to bring
anthropology into dialogue with criminology, legal theory and socio-legal
studies. Her doctoral dissertation offered an ethnographic assessment of
state-citizen relations on a council estate in England. This allowed her to
explore how vernacular ideas of citizenship, politics, and the law come into
conflict with social and legal policy. Insa’s next project is concerned with
cuts to legal aid, and its implications for access to justice in the UK. She
has recently been awarded an ESRC grant as part of a larger research team
led by Professor Deborah James at the LSE. The team’s overall objective is
to look at how the withdrawal of public funding from the advice sector is
reconfiguring relations between the market, society and the welfare state in
the UK and selected European settings.
Insa is also working on
An Ethnography of Advice, an anthropological study explores how,
under conditions of continuing economic crisis, assumptions about the nature
of society are being reshaped.
External Activities
Insa is interested to
disseminate her research amongst a broader audience. To this end, she
contributes commentary pieces to internet blogs and she has been invited to
give presentations to policy-makers and journalists in her area of
expertise. Insa has organised a number of workshops and conferences,
including a conference on class and identity politics at the University of
Oxford and a workshop on the right to a home at the LSE. She is a member of
the American Anthropological Association and the Law and Society
Association.
'Moving beyond punitivism: Punishment, state failure and
democracy at the margins' Punishment & Society [FORTHCOMING]
Recent commentary on the punitive
turn has focused on the repressive nature of criminal justice policy. Yet, on a
marginalised council estate (social housing project) in England, residents
appropriate the state in ways that do not always align with the law. What is
more, where the state fails to provide residents with the protection they need,
residents mobilise informal violence that is condemned by the state. An
ethnographic analysis of personalised uses of criminal justice questions the
state-centric assumptions of order that have informed recent narratives of the
punitive turn. It also calls for a reassessment of the relationship between
democratic politics and criminal justice by drawing attention to popular demands
that are not captured by a focus on punishment alone.
click here for full text via
Sage [ON
CAMPUS]
click here for full text via Sage [OFF CAMPUS]
'Bread-and-butter politics: Democratic disenchantment and
everyday politics on an English council estate' American Ethnologist
(April 2016)
Despite evidence of widespread
disenchantment with formal politics among England’s impoverished sectors, people
on the margins continue to engage with elected representatives on their own
terms. On English council estates (housing projects), residents mediate their
experiences of an alien and distant political system by drawing local
politicians into localized networks of support and care. While this allows
residents to voice demands for “bread and butter,” personalized alliances with
politicians rarely translate into collective action. The limits of one political
party’s bread-and-butter strategy highlight the precariousness of working-class
movements at a time when the political Left has largely been dismantled. They
also demonstrate the need to account for the lived realities of social class in
aspirational narratives for “alternative” democratic futures.
[democratic crisis, neoliberalism,
voting, working-class movements, council estates, alternative democracies,
United Kingdom]
click here for full text via
Wiley [ON
CAMPUS]
click here for full text via Wiley [OFF CAMPUS]
'The State Has Replaced the Man’ Focaal – Journal of
Global and Historical Anthropology 73 (2015) pp.84-96
This article offers an ethnographic analysis of everyday
sociality and the welfare state on a council estate in England. Taking the case
of means-tested benefits, it investigates how women’s encounters with the
welfare state come into conflict with their attempts to build and to maintain
family homes. It argues that while the current benefit system offers women a
minimum safety net, it also comes with a set of expectations about appropriate
behavior that is contrary to the fluid and collaborative nature of women’s daily
lives. While the article demonstrates that women contest the punitive effects of
the policies by subverting the rules of the benefit system, ultimately it
suggests that dependence upon the benefit system is a deeply coercive
experience. Overall, the article not only provides a critical commentary on
current policy developments in Britain but it also contributes more generally to
anthropological challenges of normative models of citizenship.
click here
for publisher's site
'Everyday Experiences of State Betrayal on an English Council
Estate' (2014) Anthropology of this Century 9.
'Brexit Referendum: first reactions from
anthropology' Social Anthropology (2016)
'A vote of no confidence in the people in power: we need local
control!' (2016) LSE Brexit Blog
‘A policy that kills’: The bedroom tax is an affront to basic
rights' (2014) LSE British Politics and Policy
‘Bedroom Tax an "attack on public welfare"’ (2013) LSE Comment
and Opinion.
‘The Bedroom Tax: A Two-Prolonged Attack’ (2013) New Left
Project
