Dr Anna Tuckett
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology

Summary

Dr. Anna Tuckett received her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2014. She specialises in political and legal anthropology, with a specific focus on migration in Italy and the UK. Anna is particularly interested in how people experience and manage the state, law and bureaucracy in their everyday lives.

Her book, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy (2018), published by Stanford University Press was awarded the 2019 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology. It examines the ways in which immigration laws and policies work on the ground in one of Europe’s biggest receiving countries. It analyses the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion that are produced through encounters with immigration law as migrants attempt to obtain legal status, renew permits and be reunited with family members. Anna's work offers new insights into established anthropological debates concerning the state, brokerage, subjectivity and ethics through the lens of a high-profile contemporary social issue, while also providing unique perspectives on debates around legality, illegality and integration.

Anna's more recent research was conducted in London as part of a collaborative ESRC-funded project entitled ‘An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state’. Exploring the emergence of unofficial and unregulated citizenship test schools in London, Anna's study examines the lived realities of integration policies within a wider context of austerity measures and state reconfiguration. 

Anna's current research project examines how “good” immigration advice is defined, learned and reproduced across national contexts, and how advice practices are being reshaped by the increasing digitisation of immigration systems. 

Prior to joining Brunel, Anna held teaching and research positions at LSE.

Qualifications

2014  PhD in Anthropology: Ambiguities of Documentation: Migrants’ Everyday Encounters with Italian Immigration Bureaucracy, LSE (examined by Professor Tony Good and Professor Ralph Grillo).

2012-2014     Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (Full Fellowship Level), LSE

Responsibility

Anthropology Admissions Tutor 2021 - present

Postgraduate Research Director 2019-2020

Module Convenor:

• Citizenship, Migration and Identity
• War and Humanitarianism
• Facing the Unfamiliar: Ethnographic Fieldwork Encounters
• Anthropology of the Body