Research summary
Hannah gained her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2003 and joined UCL in 2014 after from the ESRC Centre for Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester.
Her research is concerned with understanding processes of social and political transformation through the ethnographic study of technical relations and expert practices. Over the years her work has moved from a focus on struggles over knowledge and expertise to incorporate the role that materials of different kinds play in shaping techno-political relations. She has conducted research with new media entrepreneurs and economic development practitioners in the UK, IT managers and digital modellers in global corporations, and road construction and design engineers in Peru. Most recently she has been studying the politics of energy and climate change in a project that has been following the pursuit of carbon reduction strategies by a network of scientists, activists and local authority officers in Manchester, UK. Her work is concerned with understanding contemporary manifestations of risk and responsibility, territorial politics, expertise, knowledge and technology.
She is the co-editor of Ethnography for Data Saturated World (2018) and ‘Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion’ (2013), and author of Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (2015). Her next book Thinking like a Climate is due to be published in 2020.