Professor Laura Bear FBA

Professor Laura Bear (PhD University of Michigan) specialises in psychological and economic anthropology. Her work has focussed on intimate economies, time, infrastructures, the public good and care in South Asia, Japan and the United Kingdom. Her interdisciplinary approach has led to collaborations with the International Inequalities Institute, the editorial board of Economy and Society and ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics Network. During the Covid-19 pandemic she advised SAGE as part of their behavioural science committee focussing on questions of inequality and health disparities (ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize finalist: Laura Bear (youtube.com) She also led a team of anthropologists at LSE who carried out action and policy research on issues around Covid and care . She has experimented with different mediums including an ethnographic novel, films and policy reports. Currently she is completing her psychotherapy training in preparation for research that will explore new possibilities for psychological anthropology.

Her most recent book based on ESRC funded research in India, Navigating Austerity (2015), addresses two key questions of our era: why does austerity dominate in state policy and how can we change this? Drawing on the experiences of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly in West Bengal it proposes a social calculus. This measures policy according to the qualities of the social relations it generates and the ability it creates to plan for the future among precarious communities. This has led to comparative research on communities along the Thames in the UK and into local experiments in cooperative and post-growth economies in rural Japan. The goal of all of these projects is to build an innovative practice of the public good that can renew communities and citizen-state relations.

Expertise

South Asia, Japan and the United Kingdom, Economics, Psychology, Gender, Racialisation, Health