Dr Luke Heslop
Lecturer in Anthropology and Global Challenges

Research area(s)

• Sri Lanka
• The Maldives
• The Indian Ocean

Research Interests

Mercantile Kinship

My doctoral research traced the lives entrepreneurial families in a bustling market town in central Sri Lanka as they started and developed various businesses, built new homes, married, and campaigned for political office. Publications that stemmed from this research speak to the anthropology of money and economic sociology, kinship, class, and intergenerational relationships, as well as to a burgeoning anthropological interest in politics and protest. I am currently preparing a monograph about life, work, and social change among the trading families I have known since 2003. The monograph builds upon a body of anthropological literature on the production of kinship, class, and politics in Sri Lanka against the backdrop of a broader set of social transformations that have shaped Sri Lanka’s tumultuous post-colonial modernity; notably the war and development, economic and agrarian change, and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.

Roads, infrastructure and connectivity

2015-2017: I worked on the ERC-funded project ‘Roads and the politics of thought: Ethnographic approaches to infrastructure in South Asia’. My research explores the development of connective infrastructure – roads, bridges, and inter-island causeways – and its social and environmental effects on the Maldives archipelago and beyond. This project encompasses a number of South Asian sites and is grounded in conceptions of the state’s responsibility for national development and modernity through planned connectivity between cities and towns from the Himālaya to the Indian Ocean. From this project I have published material on infrastructure financing, road building on coralline ecologies, archipelagic connectivity and Indian Ocean mobility. For more information on this project see: http://www.roadsproject.net/.

International Development and ecosystems of advice

Ethnographic Solutions to Inequalities in South Asian Advice Ecosystems takes a closer look at the evolving 'landscapes of advice' in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and using the insights gained, aims to work with our partners to build ideas that can inform more effective and inclusive modes of advising. The project aims to better understand these processes to facilitate knowledge exchange from the ground-level of business advice ecosystems and co-produce a resource ‘toolkit’ for recipients and practitioners to address inequalities within advice delivery. By mapping and studying advice ecosystems alongside our partners in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, we intend to channel the untapped potential of practitioner-academic partnerships into capacity-building actions on the ground, leading to better advice relationships for people who need them the most.

South Asia in West London

I am currently developing a new research agenda which explores life and work for South Asian diasporas in West London. Drawing on the expertise within the South Asia Studies Research Group at Brunel, the focus on South Asia in West London cuts across three broad areas of research:

• Food and nutrition (this will build on our work on the anthropology of food and health in India, with the intention of including Brunel scholars in Life Sciences working on nutrition)
• Education and employment (this already includes separate strands on work being done in Anthropology, Geography, History, and Education)
• Business and Entrepreneurship (this draws on work being done in Anthropology, in History, and at the Business School)

As part of this project I am producing a podcast series:

This project is being supported by a small grant from the Institute for Communities and Society.

Grants