Regional specialisations and Interests East Africa (inc Kampala, Uganda) and New York City. Death; Illness and Medical Anthropology; HIV/AIDS; Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception; Art, Performance and Aesthetics; Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology; Urban Anthropology and Spatial Perception.

Recent Books

2017 The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 

Free open access version of "The Art of Life and Death" can be downloaded here:

https://www.academia.edu/37177009/FREE_DOWNLOAD_The_Art_of_Life_and_Death_Radical_Aesthetics_and_Ethnographic_Practice_Malinowski_Monographs_Chicago_University_of_Chicago_Press_pdf

2017    Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain World. Ed. Irving, A, Pink, S, Salazar, J  and Sjoberg, J. London: Bloomsbury. 

2016     Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology. Ed. Cox, R, Irving, A and Wright, C.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2014     Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Cosmopolitanisms, Rationalities and Discontents, (ed Irving, Aand Glick-Schiller, N. Oxford: Berghahn Press

Recent Research Projects

Enhancing Resilient Deaf Youth: Deaf children and youth often face discrimination and exclusion from society. They are not given adequate opportunities for acquiring language, building meaningful relationships, receiving specialised healthcare and receiving equal education. The aim is to consider how socially marginalised deaf youth become included in community and society through different kinds of media practices. The projects use visual and other sensory media and collaborative forms of self-representation to address questions of research, representation, ethics and empowerment and set up a different kind of social life.

See here for a selection of short films, photograhs and more information
http://deafcamsa.net/

Recent Audiovisiual Work

Rcent work includes the media production “The Man Who Almost Killed Himself” (made collaboration with Josh Azouz, Don Boyd HiBrow Productions and BBC Arts), which adapted some of my anthropolgical research into a play for the Edinburgh Festival, BBC Arts and Odeon Cinemas. A clip from the BBC production can be found here https://vimeo.com/105284691

The experimental art/anthropology research project "New York Stories" that researches and represents how different modes of inner expression--including interior dialogues, unarticulated moods, imaginative lifeworlds and emotional reverie--constitute peoples lived experience of urban life and mediate social-cultural spaces but remain hidden beneath the surface of public activities.

See here for recent interview and links: http://blog.wennergren.org/2013/06/interview-dr-andrew-irving-new-york-stories/

Recent Plays/Films/Exhibitions/Television

2019   “Deaf Lifeworlds: Expressions of Resilance. KwaZulu Natal SA Gallery, Durban, (Exhibition).

2019   “Reflections” Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York (Exhibition)

2016 “Wandering Scholars: Or How to Get in Touch with Strangers” Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, Vienna

2016 “Bridges: A New Sense of Scale” Ethnography in the Expanded Field. New School, New York

2015  “Live Edition” Plataforma Gallery, Bogota, Colombia

2014  “The Man Who Almost Killed Himself” (collaboration with Josh Azouz, Don Boyd HiBrow Productions and BBC Arts)

-Edinburgh Festival (Aug 7th-11th 2014)

-BBC Arts (Aug 10th 2014),

-BBC IPlayer (Aug 2014- Aug 2016)

-Odeon Cinemas (Aug 11th 2014)

2013 New York Stories: Lives of Other Citizens

2012 “The Lives of Other Citizens” SOMA Arts Gallery, San Francisco. Multi and Interactive

            Media, inc film, sound and digital technologies

2010 School Outreach in Uganda (Health Education Film made for National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda)

2009 Railway School HIV Sensitisation (Health Education Film made for National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda)

2009 Kaleidoscope: Hands and Neighbourhood

PhD supervision I welcome PhD projects across a broad range of anthropological themes, especially those that place special emphasis on the following areas: Death; Illness and Medical Anthropology; HIV/AIDS; Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception; The Anthropology of Time; Art, Performance and Aesthetics; Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology; Urban Anthropology.

Current PhD Students

Rebecca Appleton: The Poetic is Political: Contemporary Women’s poetry in Beirut, Lebanon.

Catriona Blackburn: Death and Dying in England

Alex Tomkins: Transforming the Life Chances of Deaf Ugandan Youth through Play

Shirley van der Maarel: Belonging in Europe's Depopulating Villages from a Refugee Perspective.

Laura Di Pasquale, Who am I? Negotiating the lived body after a traumatic event 

Completed PhD Students

2022 Lee Gallagher: The Journey Back Home: Processes of Recovery and Disjuncture in Traumatic Brain Injury 

2021 Paloma Yanez Serrano: It is What it is: Local Resistances and Life Sustaining Strategies in  Spain’s “Plastic Sea”


2021 Rosa Sansone: The Social Formation of the Mediterranean Sea: An Ethnographic Perspective on Movement and Perception across Lampedusian Waters

2020     Veronica Castro Yupumá: experience, epistemology and ethnographic filmmaking practice

2019     Jose Farjado Escoffie: A journey with the native potato: from local knowledge to luxury consumption

2018     Lana Askari: Homemaking: Return dynamics of Kurdish diaspora

2018     Angelica Cabezas Pino: Audiovisual Strategies to overcome stigma among men with HIV in Chile )

2017     Karen Waltorp: Mirror Images The smartphone as relational device among Muslim women

2017     JongMin Jeong: Healing the brain through sensory stimulation and activities

2017     Alessandra D’Onofrio Imaginary Tales from either Shore: undocumented Egyptian migrants in Milan

2017     Shotaro Wake: Empathy and stigma: their consequences for cancer survivors

2016     Ximin Zhou: Between Promises and Uncertainty: An Anthropological Study of Roads

2016    Paola Garnica: Visual perception and urban life: Mexico City

2015    Ruth Gibbons: It's all of these Puzzle Pieces: The representation of dyslexic experience.

2015    Martha Dietrich-Ortega: Sensing prison: the bodily and imaginative aspects of imprisonment among female prisoners in Peru

2015    Placido Munoz Moran: Street art, cultural identity and public space in Barcelona

2015    Rachael Gore: Rhythmic horizons: mapping sound in London

2014     Michael Atkins: Looking for business: social and visual ambiguity of men that sell sex on the street

2014    Camilla Morelli: Movement, Materiality and Imagination: world-making and knowing amongst Matses children of Amazonian Peru

2013    Carolina Corral: Indefinite Sentence. The enduring presence of imprisonment in the lives of former inmates in Mexico

2013    Giovanni Spissu: The People of Long Street, Cape Town

2013    Andrea Gasper: Conceptions of the visual in the contemporary design world: an ethnography of design

2012     Natalie Araujo: Sin dejar: the cosmopolitan negotiations of Colombian migrants in London

2011    Penny Moore: Living a Musical Life: Musicians, Music-Making and the Creation of Space in Vienna

2010    Alyssa Grossman: Choreographies of Memory: everyday sites and practices of remembrance work in post-socialist, EU accession-era Bucharest

OTHER OUTPUTS

Recent Plays/Films/Exhibitions/Television

2019   “Deaf Lifeworlds: Expressions of Resilance. KwaZulu Natal SA Gallery, Durban, (Exhibition).

2019   “Reflections” Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York (Online Exhibition)

2016 “Wandering Scholars: Or How to Get in Touch with Strangers” Österreichisches Museum

           für Volkskunde, Vienna

2016 “Bridges: A New Sense of Scale” Ethnography in the Expanded Field. New School, New

            York

2015  “Live Edition” Plataforma Gallery, Bogota, Colombia

2014  “The Man Who Almost Killed Himself” (collaboration with Josh Azouz, Don Boyd HiBrow Productions and BBC Arts)

-Edinburgh Festival (Aug 7th-11th 2014)

-BBC Arts (Aug 10th 2014),

-BBC IPlayer (Aug 2014- Aug 2016)

-Odeon Cinemas (Aug 11th 2014)

2013 New York Stories: Lives of Other Citizens

2012 “The Lives of Other Citizens” SOMA Arts Gallery, San Francisco. Multi and Interactive

            Media, inc film, sound and digital technologies

2010 School Outreach in Uganda (Health Education Film made for National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda)

2009 Railway School HIV Sensitisation (Health Education Film made for National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda)

2009 Kaleidoscope: Hands and Neighbourhood

My research explores how the world appears to people close to death, particularly in terms of the perception of time, existence and otherness. It involves detailed ethnographic comparisons of living with HIV/AIDS within radically different cultural contexts; primarily Uganda and New York, so as to understand how experiences of illness, death and dying are mediated by different cultural and religious practices. My focus here is the ever-changing relationship between bodily integrity and people's practices and beliefs and how people adopt different strategies to engage with the daily struggle of illness and re-establish social and existential continuity. As such my research tries to enter into the world of people who through death, disease or some other dislocating experience have started to become detached from life and its everyday life and rhythms. I am particularly interested in how these worlds are constituted through radical changes in being, belief and perception that occur when people are confronting their own or another person’s mortality. Changes in perceptions of body image and self; changes in people’s aesthetic appreciation of time and existence; changes in pre-existing practices and religious beliefs; changes in the type of imaginary worlds people inhabit in relation to material surroundings; and changes in the meaning and character of everyday social roles and interactions when contemplating one’s decline and death, or more recently migrants inhabiting a new territory.

Aside from deathly matters my anthropological concerns are phenomenology, visual and sensory perception, art, performance and creativity, existential anthropology, time, comparisons of personhood, religious change, gender and urban experiences. I am currently developing a number of research projects under the collective theme of Rethinking Media/Reclaiming Personhood that consider how socially marginalised persons can become included in community and society through different kinds of media and media practices. The projects use visual and other media and use collaborative forms of self-representation that are designed to not only offer a better understanding of marginalised persons but also transform their social and existential circumstances and set up a different kind of social life.