ADAM REED - Affiliated Researcher

Adam Reed is a social anthropologist (PhD University of Cambridge, 1977). He conducted his original research in Papua New Guinea, in the country's largest penal establishment. There he focused on issues around experiences of incarceration, including articulations of loss and exile and popular narratives of nationhood, city, money and crime. Since then he has held pos-doctoral research fellowships at the University of Cambridge and taught at the University of Manchester.

At INCITE he conducted an ethnography of London, considering the ways in which residents personify their city - ascribe it a distinctive character or atmosphere-and the kinds of interpretive strategies they deploy in order to make that description 'real'. This includes attention paid to issues of mobility in the city, to public representations of transience and forms of brief urban encounter. He has also been working on ethnography of literature and literary cultures, exploring the ways in which a community of readers articulates a relationship to specific texts. This includes an examination of the connection between reading and appreciation for landscape, but also looks at issues around causality, memory and reading, and the material culture of book ownership and collection.

All these strands of research experience were brought together to inform his post as a research fellow of INCITE. Fieldwork conducted on the "Urban Mobilities" project led him to engage with a range of new media and old media cultures in London.