news
Anthropology and sociology
29 September 2017

Grants awarded to the ANSO department

The Department of Anthropology and Sociology recently dropped from its name the qualifier “of Development”. This change was motivated not by a fading interest for development but by our willingness to study global issues without being restricted to any specific aspect, how important it might be. Building on its location in Geneva, ANSO is in an exceptional position for exploring ethnographically the “international” in a way that sets it apart from long-established university departments in the disciplines.

Beside numerous grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Network for International Studies covering a range of topics such as agrarian transformation and urban coexistence, genetic resources and gemstone trading, state violence and migration, solidarity economy and gift giving practices, ANSO collaborators have obtained four research projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Medical anthropologists Aditya Bharadwaj and Vinh-Kim Nguyen have been respectively supported to study the emergence of stem cell biotechnologies and the effort to eradicate the HIV epidemic in the Global South. More recently, Grégoire Mallard got a grant to analyse the sociological logics and discursive shifts that have led some governments and multilateral institutions to sanction “bad banks” involved in activities related to weapons of mass destruction. Valerio Simoni, Ambizione Researcher, was granted this summer a five-year ERC project exploring how ideals of the “good life” are articulated in contexts of crisis and migration. Global heath programmes, lab technologies or banking activities, there are no objects of study falling outside the scope of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. 

The Department of Anthropology and Sociology recently dropped from its name the qualifier “of Development”. This change was motivated not by a fading interest for development but by our willingness to study global issues without being restricted to any specific aspect, how important it might be. Building on its location in Geneva, ANSO is in an exceptional position for exploring ethnographically the “international” in a way that sets it apart from long-established university departments in the disciplines.

Beside numerous grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Network for International Studies covering a range of topics such as agrarian transformation and urban coexistence, genetic resources and gemstone trading, state violence and migration, solidarity economy and gift giving practices, ANSO collaborators have obtained four research projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Medical anthropologists Aditya Bharadwaj and Vinh-Kim Nguyen have been respectively supported to study the emergence of stem cell biotechnologies and the effort to eradicate the HIV epidemic in the Global South. More recently, Grégoire Mallard got a grant to analyse the sociological logics and discursive shifts that have led some governments and multilateral institutions to sanction “bad banks” involved in activities related to weapons of mass destruction. Valerio Simoni, Ambizione Researcher, was granted this summer a five-year ERC project exploring how ideals of the “good life” are articulated in contexts of crisis and migration. Global heath programmes, lab technologies or banking activities, there are no objects of study falling outside the scope of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology.