EMMA CREWE

I recently wrote an article about the UK Parliament’s role in creating, maintaining and delaying the abolition of Transatlantic African Trafficking and Chattel Enslavement. If Parliament were to face up to this history and its impact, it could contribute to the repair that is needed in a world that remains racist towards Africans both on their continent and in the diaspora. I discovered that at least one of my ancestors was an enslaver. John Crewe was compensated £5,102 for 234…

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Texas politics is a harbinger of what is to come or decades behind the UK. Or both. The long tradition of bipartisanship in the Texas House of Representatives, whereby elected Representations in both political parties collaborate to get bills passed, is under attack. The Republicans have dominated Texas politicis since the 1990s. But while their ideology and aspirations have been moderate, and mostly focused on the economy and providing services, in the Texas House of Representatives they worked with Democrats…

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In universities we face the triple burden of: a financial model that no longer works well because we are not funded by government and want to resist the push to become businesses; a mental health and economic crisis facing staff and students; intense (and often uneven) workloads, taking us away from what we want to be doing: teaching, researching, writing and contributing to public good. I am typical in trying to do too much. In my case I’m head of…

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An exhibition on the relationship between politicians and people! Taking place in the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 9am to 5pm, 13 January to 16 March 2024, it features research findings from six countries: Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji, India, the UK and the US. Living Democracy – Frayed entanglements offers films, photography, installations, audio and text that reveal riffs, rhythms and rituals in Parliaments. It is an explosion of creativity by a team of researchers and film-makers from Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji and the…

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The Global Research Network on Parliaments and People, at SOAS’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology, has initiated a new research programme with the Mursi (or Mun), a group of agro-pastoralists living in the Lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia. They have found encounters with outsiders mostly painful, and often violent, in tune with most indigenous groups globally. This new GRNPP initiative will support members of the Mursi community to promote more peaceful encounters with the outside world and advise their…

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If you have ever been through an organisational restructuring, you might not have been surprised that disentangling the UK from the European Union was going to present huge difficulties. Add the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, climate breakdown and chronically under-staffed state organisations, and you have a context that creates impossible challenges. So much for the bigger picture. Within the Westminster Parliament politics is supposed to work in certain ways. MPs show loyalty to their party, which often means those…

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Mud-slinging between rivals in the Tory leadership election sounds like more of the same old ‘tribalism’ in UK politics. But this is not just politicians behaving badly because they are unpleasant people or politics is dirty. Choosing a new leader reveals how much politicians are forced to shapeshift into different groups, improvising into new alliances and enmities to further their interests and causes. To dismiss the way politics enacts as tribalism, is to disparage both politics and the societies around…

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In a New Statesman podcast released today, I discussed ethics in Westminster with writer Armando Iannucci, MP Anum Qaisar and journalist Ailbhe Rea. It is clearly time for a debate about our expectations of politicians. How did the UK get itself into a situation where the Prime Minister is still in post although he lied to parliament. Apparently when Hemingway was asked how he went bankrupt, he replied: “Gradually, then suddenly.” That does seem to be the way of important…

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I’m embarking on new research about how politicians, journalists and researchers tell truths and lies and how knowledge travels around political worlds. I was once tempted to lie in research about MPs. Or was it a lie? In the run up to a UK general election, the Guardian phoned my publisher and said that a well-known academic had written a blog about how I found cheating in the previous election. If they ran with a story about it, would I…

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Global coalitions tend to be constrained by hierarchies of knowledge and harmful partnership practices. I wrote about how this plays out between international NGOs and national/local NGOs in Whose Development? (1998), with co-author Elizabeth Harrison, and some years later about some strategies for challenging  these inequalities in an article called Doing Development Differently (2014). At a small INGO working on child rights we questioned our assumptions about where expertise lies. We once claimed that we were experts in child protection…

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