Andrew Irving

Current Research

Co-Creative MiND: The Inner Lifeworlds of MND

This multidisciplinary project will establish the world’s first ethnographic and participatory investigation into the interior lifeworlds of Motor Neurone Disease, combining medical-anthropology, computer-science, and co-creative practice. Affecting 1/300 people, MND encompasses the loss of speech, movement, and facial expression. Many people only have limited communicative means, e.g. eye-gaze technology. The substantial barriers between internalised consciousness and public expression means important thoughts, concerns and experiences remain unexpressed, exacerbating isolation, with profound psychosocial impacts. Increasing longevity indicates pressing need for life quality interventions.

By necessity, MND comprises a rich, complex inner lifeworld, encompassing streams of thought, reflection, storytelling and imagination that constitute daily lived experience. We propose these vital forms of internalised expression are the most immediate and accessible means through which people can negotiate illness, redefine existence, and improve mental wellbeing. The project will enhance social-life, extend communicative capacity and enable people to share their internalised lifeworlds through Co-Creative-MiND: a national hub that will develop, test and advance new communicative technologies, body-computer interfaces and creative tools to facilitate social interaction, creative expression and investigative research, delivering advances in ethnographic and medical knowledge, demonstrating how life with MND can be transformed through co-creative practice aligned to people’s specific embodiments, temporalities, and interests.

Funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award (2025-2030)

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.

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 in Soweto and Durban

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.

Funded by an MRC/AHRC Global Challenges Research Grant 2018-2020 (Ref: AH/R00580X/1.)

Plays/Films/Exhibitions/Television

2025    “Ms MNDy’s Adventures in Wonderland” (Theatre Production), Shaw Theatre London..

2024    “See Me/Hear Me: The Art of an Extraordinary Life”, (Theatre Production), Contact Theatre, Manchester..

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 -Edinburgh Festival,  BBC Arts, BBC IPlayer, Odeon Cinemas)

A clip from the BBC production can be found here https://vimeo.com/105284691

2013 New York Stories: Lives of Other Citizens

http://blog.wennergren.org/2013/06/interview-dr-andrew-irving-new-york-stories/

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

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; Interior Dialogue, Memory and Imagination; Visual, Sensory and Bodily Perception;  Experimental Methods and Collaborative Anthropology; Existential and Phenomenological Anthropology. 

Current PhD Students

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

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.

Amira Karoud: Embodied Black Atlantic Movement: Encruzilhada, Speculative Imagination, and World-Making in Contemporary Performing Dance and VR for Afro-Brazilian Women Artists

Haeweon Yi: Foraging Pesilience: The Performing Body in Mycological Relationships

Completed PhD Students

2026 Laura Di Pasquale: Who am I? Negotiating the lived body after a traumatic event 

2026 Joana Salles: The Right to Age in Place: Navigating and Resisting Gentrification in Later Life

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