This year, the EMKP Panel welcomed three new members: Professor Catherine Allerton (LSE), Professor Knut Rio (UB), and Dr. Daniel Rycroft (UEA). The EMKP Panel consists of international experts in various fields, who generously contribute their time and knowledge to the programme to award the grants to the selected projects and teams.
Catherine Allerton is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is a specialist in island Southeast Asia, particularly eastern Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo. Her work explores the materialities and mobilities of everyday life, and she has a particular interest in Southeast Asian architecture and weaving. Central research themes include place and landscape, houses, kinship, childhood, migration and statelessness. She is the author of Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia (Hawai’i 2013) and Children: Ethnographic Encounters (Bloomsbury 2016). She is currently finishing a book on children of refugees and migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia.
Catherine Allerton, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Knut Rio is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research has been concerned with Melanesian anthropology and such topics as: gift exchange; hierarchy and egalitarianism; the material and the social; the colonial history of the Pacific; as well as issues to do with witchcraft, divination and sacrifice. He is curator for the ethnographic collections at the University Museum of Bergen and has been involved in many exhibitions, most recently on Greenland. He has published The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu (2007), Hierarchy: Persistence and transformation in social formations (co-edited with Olaf Smedal, 2009), Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific (co-edited with Edvard Hviding 2011), The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and Policing in Melanesia (co-edited with Andrew Lattas 2011), and Towards an Anthropology of Wealth (co-edited with Theodoros Rakopoulos, 2019).
Knut Rio, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bergen and Curator for the Ethnographic Collections at the University Museum of Bergen.
Dr. Daniel Rycroft is an Associate Professor in the Arts and Cultures of Asia at the University of East Anglia (School of History and Art History). He is currently Course Director of the MA in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, and Co-Director of the ‘Humanities in India’ partnership programme. His editorial and monographic work focuses on India’s minority histories, Indian anthropology, as well as on legacies of colonialism. His most recent book is entitled The Humanities in India as Pluralist Pedagogy (Orient Blackswan, 2023). Dr. Rycroft is currently involved in various joint projects that address Academic Social Responsibility as a participatory methodology.
Daniel Rycroft, Associate Professor in the Arts and Cultures of Asia at the University of East Anglia.
Their academic expertise significantly contributes to the selection process of the programme, and a warm welcome is extended to Catherine, Knut, and Daniel from the EMKP. They join five other panellists, who can be read about in further detail on our Programme page.